Human Rights Commission

Baroness Prashar: rose to move, That this House takes note of the report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights on The Case for a Human Rights Commission (6th Report, Session 2002–03, HL Paper 67).

Baroness Prashar: My Lords, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to open this debate. Before I address the substance of the report, I would like to thank all those who contributed to it. We obtained a substantial quantity of written and oral evidence, benefited greatly from our visits to Northern Ireland, Scotland, India, Australia and New Zealand, and from vast amounts of specific and general research on the nature and structure of national human rights institutions. We were greatly assisted by our special advisers and Clerks from both Houses. Our deliberations, which were often heated but always illuminating, lasted nearly two years.
	In March 2003, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which is ably and admirably chaired by Mrs Jean Corston in the other place and on which I serve, published the report on the case for a human rights commission.
	In the 1997 White Paper, Rights Brought Home, the Government suggested that any parliamentary committee on human rights that was established after the Human Rights Act was passed might examine whether a human rights commission was needed and how it should operate. The Government undertook to give full weight to the findings of such a committee. This report is our response. We concluded that the case for establishing an independent body to promote a culture of respect for human rights and protect human rights in England and Wales is compelling.
	This report also constituted our formal response to the Government's consultation on institutional arrangements for the promotion of equality and diversity. The right to equality of treatment and enjoyment of other rights without discrimination is a fundamental human right. There is a considerable degree of congruence between the work required for the promotion of equality and that required for the promotion and protection of human rights. There are divergences, but, on balance, we concluded that our preferred option is an integrated human rights and equality commission.
	Although we have not had a formal response to our report, the Government have published a draft statement in which they said that they had considered carefully our report and decided that the new body's remit should cover the promotion of human rights together with responsibility for equality. Of course, we welcome the Government's decision to create a single equality and human rights commission, but will watch with keen interest to see how it is structured and what powers and functions it will have.
	In December 2003, the Joint Committee also took oral evidence from the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor when we were able to explore with him some of the issues raised in our report. Although some of the issues that I intend to raise this morning have been covered by the Government's statement regarding the proposed equality and human rights commission and as part of the oral evidence that we took from the noble and learned Lord, it is still worth covering some of the same ground and seeking further clarification on issues such as the functions, structure and governance of the new commission. Before stating the specific questions which need consideration, I would like to spell out why the committee felt that the need for a human rights commission was compelling.
	After examining all the evidence before us, we concluded that the development of a culture of respect for human rights is in danger of stalling. Human rights have the potential to be agents of positive change. There is, however, a danger that this potential will be dissipated if human rights are perceived as solely of interest to lawyers. There is an urgent need for the momentum to be revived and the project driven forward. Since the Government are committed to developing a culture of respect for human rights, they have a duty of leadership. If they will the end, they must also will the means. Precious time has already been wasted. It is still some two years before we will actually have a single body to promote equality and human rights. It is important to keep up the momentum.
	We recognise that building a human rights culture is an ambitious vision. There are many barriers to achieving it. The greatest of these is ignorance, and some may well ask, "What is a culture of respect for human rights?" In such a culture, people will be better informed about their rights and responsibilities and what they could mean in practice. The most vulnerable will be better protected from violations of human rights. Government and public authorities would protect and promote human rights standards and treat all people with dignity, fairness and respect. Those standards will be generally accepted as those by which we should all strive to treat each other and people will recognise and value their own rights and those of others. People's human rights can be violated every day—in the provision of housing, education and health services. We took evidence from the wide range of bodies concerned with monitoring and regulating public authorities. It was clear that, by and large, public authorities and those who inspect, advise and audit them do not give a high priority to human rights.
	We found that public authorities such as local councils and hospitals do not by and large put respect for human rights at the heart of their policies and practices. They do enough to avoid litigation, but no more. However, that is not always the result of deliberate neglect; for the most part, it is the result of lack of awareness, lack of leadership and lack of help. There is no vision, no administrative framework and scant guidance reaching public authorities to tell them how a culture of respect for human rights might look and how it can be delivered.
	There is a need for the active promotion of understanding that convention rights can cause positive duties in public authority. Too often, human rights are looked upon as something from which the state needs to defend itself, rather than to promote as its core ethical value. There is a failure to recognise the important part that the state can play in promoting social justice and inclusion in the drive to improve public services. Our inquiry persuaded us that the best way of encouraging a culture of human rights was by demonstrating that human rights, as the British Institute for Human Rights said, "have something for everyone", in areas such as treatment of the elderly, healthcare provisions, adequate housing, and so on. Many of the rights involved are social and economic rights, and those issues lie at the heart of the Government's agenda to reform public services.
	We therefore believe that a more explicit commitment to effective implementation of the covenant of economic, social and culture rights would help to promote a culture of respect for human rights as well as giving a useful point of focus for the Government's plans for improving public services. Against that background, our conclusion was that human rights need a home and an independent champion. That would give human rights focus and resources and a degree of institutional stability, which we have not had to date.
	The role of this champion would be to encourage respect for human rights among public authorities as a matter of best practice rather than risk avoidance; to promote an understanding that human rights principles provide a framework within which vulnerable and disadvantaged people can negotiate with public authorities for better conditions and treatment; to conduct inquires into systematic problems and encourage mediations in situations of conflict; to participate in public debate and be a beacon and rallying point for the defence of human rights values when commitment to them was weak or under attack, whether from within government or without; and to be a critical friend to government.
	To be an effective body, it is crucial that the commission has appropriate functions and relevant powers. We listed a number of powers that we believe that the commission should have, particularly in relation to human rights. It should have the power to promote an understanding and awareness of human rights, including not only convention rights but also rights embodied in international human rights instruments which bind the UK; to conduct and commission research and provide financial and other assistance for educational activities; to conduct inquiries into matters of public policy and practice; to give guidance to and promote best practice in public authorities; to offer guidance and advice to Ministers and Parliament; to publish reports on any of the above matters; to assist in the provision of advice and assistance to members of the public on ways in which to find help to protect, assert or vindicate their rights; to support and promote access to alternatives to litigation in disputes; to apply to the courts for permission to appear as amicus curiae in proceedings; or to intervene as a third party in legal proceedings.
	Alongside those powers, we published a consultation document and sought views on three issues: first, whether it would be desirable for such a body to have powers and functions to provide assistance, including financial assistance, to individuals to take test cases relating to convention rights questions; secondly, whether it should be able to take cases in its own name where a victim of a breach of convention rights cannot be identified; and, thirdly, whether it should be able to apply for judicial review in its own name in relation to questions connected with human rights.
	Apart from functions and powers, accountability and independence of any new body is crucial, if it is to have the desired effect. We were strongly of the view that the commission should be accountable to Parliament rather than the Government and outlined a number of options on how the accountability would work. We have sought views on the details on how the commission would be held accountable. However, we do not consider that the standard model of accountability that applies to non-departmental public bodies is a sufficiently outward and visible guarantee for independence from government. To ensure complete independence for the body, we suggested that there should be some form of statutory requirement to consult Parliament on the appointment of the commissioners of the new body, and that they should be appointed according to Nolan rules.
	Now that the Government have agreed to establish a single equality and human rights commission, it is important that the new body should not be seen as a merger between the existing equality commissions with human rights attached to it and as a poor relation. It should be a new integrated body with a new approach and ethos. Its approach should be inclusive and designed to strengthen its ability to promote a culture that respects the dignity, work and human rights of everyone.
	When the Government announced the establishment of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights in October 2003, they said that no conclusions on key issues, such as the governance of the body and its internal structures, had been reached and that a task force had been established to advise government on these and other relevant issues. They said the role of the new commission would be to promote a culture of respect for human rights, especially in the delivery of public services. Will the Minister clarify what this task force will be looking at and what are the limits on its discretion to make recommendations? In respect of human rights, what, if anything, has been ruled in or ruled out?
	It would also be helpful to know how our recommendations will be considered by the task force and, where our recommendations are rejected, whether we will be given reasons. Will the new body have an enforcement role—that is, the adjudication powers that the current Equal Opportunities Commission, the Commission for Racial Equality and the Disability Rights Commission have to enforce gender, race and disability equality legislation by issuing non-discrimination notices to named persons and applying to the court for injunctions?
	Furthermore, is it envisaged that the power to conduct thematic inquiries into the handling of human rights issues will be along the lines we recommended in our report—that is, the power to initiate public inquiries and, with the appropriate safeguards, the power to call persons and papers?
	We suggested that the commission should apply to the court for orders to compel witnesses to give evidence and produce documents. We were concerned that a procedure requiring authorisation by a Secretary of State would not sufficiently meet Article 6 requirements. Does the Minister agree that it is essential that the commission is seen to be independent of government and should be able to exercise its public inquiry power on its own account?
	Finally, in paving the way legislatively for the establishment of the new commission, would not a unified framework of equality legislation make the whole process of integration much simpler? There is now a positive duty on public bodies to promote racial equality and good community relations. Positive duties for gender and disability have also been promised. If legislation is to be introduced for some equality strands, do the Government agree that there is a rationale for extending that positive duty not only to all six equality strands but also to equality as a whole?
	In relation to human rights, and particularly in view of the recent court decisions on the nature of positive obligations on public authorities to secure convention rights, are the Government concerned to ensure that legislation underpinning promotional work for human rights is at least equal to that provided for equality?
	To sum up, we all believe that the Human Rights Act is a force for good and that we have a duty to ensure that the aspirations of the Act are made a reality, not by encouraging a culture of negative compliance, but by positively promoting a culture of respect for human rights. Positive promotion requires a champion—a commission that has effective powers, adequate resources and is truly independent of government. I very much hope that we will get such a commission. I look forward to hearing the views of other speakers and to the response of the Lord Chancellor. I beg to move.
	Moved, That this House takes note of the report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights on The Case for a Human Rights Commission (6th Report, Session 2002–03, HL Paper 67).—(Baroness Prashar.)

Lord Lester of Herne Hill: My Lords, it is a particular pleasure to speak in this debate immediately after the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, has so ably and comprehensively introduced the committee's report. She and I have worked together for many years seeking to promote equality of opportunity without discrimination, especially racial equality, as well as working for the effective protection of human rights generally.
	I speak as a member of the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights, as one of the architects of the Sex Discrimination and Race Relations Acts and as someone who has acted as counsel for the Equal Opportunities Commissions here and in Northern Ireland and for the Commission for Racial Equality.
	We on these Benches welcome the Government's decision to set up a new equality and human rights commission in accordance with the committee's recommendations provided, and I emphasise provided, that some basic conditions are met. That proviso is crucial and I hope that the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor will be able to give a positive response to each of them in his reply to the debate.
	Meanwhile, I should like to pay tribute to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, who I am delighted to see in his place. I do so not only because he is a great champion of human rights, now unfortunately lost to the wise counsels of Cabinet, but also because I am convinced that without his personal role we would not have made the progress that is being made towards an equality and human rights commission. I am perfectly satisfied that that is the case.
	The decision is long overdue. In March 1997, the Labour and Liberal Democrat Joint Consultative Committee on Constitutional Reform, which was co-chaired by Robin Cook MP and my noble friend Lord Maclennan of Rogart, published a report in which both parties envisaged that there would be a human rights commission or commissioner to advise and assist those seeking protection of their rights under the European Convention on Human Rights and be able to bring legal proceedings in its own name. In a Labour Party briefing paper by the noble Lord, Lord Warner—then special adviser to the shadow Home Secretary, the right honourable Jack Straw MP—it was envisaged that there would indeed be a human rights commission set up within what was described as "a reasonable time".
	As a result of a complaint that I was driven to make as the result of some hilarious correspondence between me and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, about the unnecessary secrecy surrounding the disclosure of the background documents relating to the making of the Human Rights Act—correspondence in which the noble and learned Lord was kind enough to tell me to wait for 30 years since he thought that I was in robust health and at the age of 94 would enjoy reading the record—I am glad to say that some redacted documents were disclosed to me, crudely and quite unnecessarily censored in black. Among those documents was a Home Office minute of June 1997 which indicated clearly that there would be a human rights commission. Unfortunately—I suspect because the Treasury blocked the proposal—it was kicked into extremely long grass.
	As the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, said, the Government announced that they would ask the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights to consider the case for a human rights commission. But there was a snag: there was no Joint Select Committee on Human Rights, and there was not for several valuable years which were wasted before eventually our committee was established under the great chairing of Jean Corston MP, to whom I also pay great tribute. That was a regrettable waste of time because the time when a human rights commission was most needed was in the period following enactment of the Human Rights Act, when a culture of respect for human rights could have been promoted, including understanding of the meaning of that Act. Even now, seven years later, the Government are dragging their feet, with a task force to follow our detailed work before there is any commitment to use parliamentary time to legislate in this important area.
	I turn now to the basic conditions that in my view must be satisfied if the new commission is to succeed in its daunting tasks. If I do not refer to the detailed speech made by the noble Baroness it is because I do not want to repeat anything that she has said. I agree with it in its totality; I simply wish to emphasise certain points.
	The first is that the commission's leadership must be chosen to ensure that it is completely independent of government. There continue to be rumours among sensible people—they are only rumours—that despite the Government's undertaking to appoint the chair and other members of the new commission in compliance with the spirit and letter of the Nolan principles, the chair has been in some way promised to a close political friend of the Government. Many in the field are concerned that the new commission will not be robustly independent but will be executive minded. We shall have to wait and see. I have no doubt that the noble and learned Lord will reassure us in his reply that it will be independent. We shall have to wait to see how that works in practice.
	My second point concerns resources. In terms of the commission's funding and staffing, the resources must be sufficient to ensure that it is able to tackle unjustifiable discrimination wherever it exists, as well as tackling breaches of human rights beyond the equality field. After my noble friend Lord Jenkins of Hillhead and I left the Home Office in 1976, successive governments have clipped the wings of existing commissions in part by starving them of necessary resources to carry out their crucial law enforcement functions. In my view that must stop.
	Thirdly, the chair and other members of the commission and their staff must be both able and willing to carry out their vital strategic law enforcement functions as a main priority and not as an optional extra, and to do so to the best professional standards that one finds in other enforcement agencies. This means that the commission must not be an amalgamation of the existing equality commissions and their staff but a genuinely new and powerful body. The dead weight of custom and practice for over 30 years and jobs for the staff of the old commissions must not be allowed to rule the future commission; otherwise, it will be doomed from the start.
	The fourth point is that the commission's important task in promoting a culture of respect for human rights must not weaken really effective action to tackle discrimination. There must be no levelling down of existing protection against discrimination, but a levelling up. That is easy for me to say, but it is difficult to achieve.
	My fifth point is that the commission must demonstrate that it will give equal protection to all the victims of the different forms of discrimination, including the special needs of the disabled. My Equality Bill that was approved by this House last year sought to do that in a way that would not tear the fabric of the commission and make it into a body that was full of separate, self-contained and different compartments.
	Sixthly, the poor old Equality and Human Rights Commission is to inherit a tangled and incoherent mess of existing equality laws that need to be replaced as a high priority by a comprehensive, coherent and user-friendly single equality Act that gives effect to the wise and practical proposals made by Professor Sir Bob Hepple QC and his colleagues in their authoritative report.
	Britain's equality code is a tangled thicket of inconsistent and incomplete legislation in urgent need of coherent reform. Its complexity makes it especially difficult for small businesses to comply with their legal obligations and hinders victims in their access to justice. Even the basic concepts of discrimination differ without rhyme or reason in the hotchpotch of different statutes. The equality agencies that were created to tackle entrenched discriminatory practices by means of strategic law enforcement have never treated that as their main priority and are not resourced to do so.
	The poor old Equal Pay Act is hopelessly complex and ineffective. Equal pay between women and men remains a goal still to be achieved 33 years after the Equal Pay Act was introduced by Barbara Castle. Some 246 Members of the other place signed an Early Day Motion supporting my single Equality Bill, or a single equality Bill, but the Government refuse to recognise the pressing need for a coherent, user-friendly framework covering all the main types of unjustifiable discrimination on grounds of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, religious belief or lack of it, and age, not only in employment but also in education, housing, goods and services. The Government do not recognise that instead of relying upon a negative duty not to discriminate, as the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, said, a new equality Act needs to place positive equality duties on public bodies and to require large employers to introduce equity plans.
	Rather than introduce an equality Bill to clarify and simplify the law, I am sorry to say that the Government have used cramped, delegated legislation to give effect to the European equality directives. By deciding not to bring in primary legislation, the Government have fettered Parliament's ability to legislate to tackle unjustifiable discrimination, in the words of Labour's 1997 election manifesto, "wherever it exists". The Government have even excluded discrimination on grounds of colour from the strengthened Race Relations Act and introduced a wide loophole to permit discrimination against gay and lesbian workers to appease the strongly held views of homophobic extreme religious groups.
	Seventhly—I have only two more points after this—the commission's mandate must cover not only human rights in the context of equality but all of the human rights, economic and social as well as civil and political, protected by the international human rights treaties by which the United Kingdom is bound. That is particularly important now that we also have a European Charter of Fundamental Rights. The Government have not accepted that that should be so, yet if the commission is to deal only with human rights in the context of equality, it will not be a human rights commission worthy of the name.
	Eighthly, the commission must have adequate powers to investigate practices and procedures that are incompatible not only with discrimination but also with human rights standards, including, as the noble Baroness said, the power to obtain information and to bring legal proceedings for breaches of the convention rights. The Government have not yet recognised that the commission should have any powers beyond those now given to the existing equality agencies. But, if I may say so, there is no point in creating a toothless human rights commission as a kind of statutory NGO. Surely the new commission should be no less powerful than, for example, the Irish Human Rights Commission in Dublin.
	Finally, I was persuaded by the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, and the majority of my fellow members of the committee to recommend a single commission. I did so reluctantly and because it was made clear that the Government would not accept a separate human rights commission linked with an equality commission. I was, and remain, concerned that it will be difficult to create a successful equality commission—more successful than anything we have seen so far—without overloading it with an even broader mandate to tackle abuses of human rights generally. It will be even more difficult for the project to succeed if the commission is lopsided, with strong powers to tackle inequality and few powers to tackle wider human rights abuses. It would be beyond the ability of the most gifted commissioners and the most professional staff to enable such a commission to succeed in the ways that I and the committee hope will happen.
	As I said, I hope that the Minister will address those concerns in his reply, that the task force will be robust in its advice, that its advice—the noble Baroness mentioned this—will be published, and that the Government will introduce really effective legislation to translate the ideals of equality and human rights into practical reality and make those ideals valuable to ordinary men and women.

Baroness Whitaker: My Lords, I am proud of this report. It was quite a long journey, and arrival is an immense tribute to the chair, my right honourable friend Jean Corston, our Clerk, Paul Evans, and all our advisers and staff. I am in fact more than proud; I am exhilarated, because it is a rare privilege to be in at the beginning of a potentially transformational event. The report sets out the case, which the Government have accepted, for a deep but subtle change for the better in the relation of the state—public authorities—to the citizen.
	What is this change all about? In the report, we call it a human rights culture. We say that, although we have an excellent Human Rights Act, it has not inspired the public authorities to take its values to heart throughout their conduct. As the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, said in her comprehensive and illuminating speech, our stretched and target-oriented public services can lose sight of their real purpose. Mary Robinson reminded us of the founding human rights document, the United Nations charter, which states,
	"determined to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person".
	I say again,
	"the dignity and worth of the human person".
	We looked to see how far the dignity and worth of the human person was respected by our public authorities. We found—and the British Institute of Human Rights found in Jenny Watson's excellent report, Something for Everyone—that old people in a residential home might be fed their breakfast sitting on a commode; that an elderly man might be left naked in public while undergoing medical procedures; that children in care can be kept hundreds of miles from their siblings or moved 35 times in three years; that boys of African-Caribbean origin are over five times more likely to be excluded from school, thereby materially undermining their chances of qualification and employment; that the children of travellers in Northern Ireland have a mortality rate 10 times that of the settled community; that adults with learning difficulties may be indiscriminately forbidden from forming intimate relationships; that deaf people may be denied interpreters when arrested and refused bail; and that child carers may be denied their right to education. The list is endless.
	While no one would claim that those extremes sum up our public services, whose women and men contribute every day to the humanity and solidarity of our society for not very much money and often without much appreciation, equally many would agree with the Government that the culture of service delivery is in need of reform. I speak as one who, some years ago, administered various parts of the public service, and I noticed then a tendency to a culture of very restrictive guardianship of public resources—typically, the culture of the client having to get the better of an argument with the provider in order to obtain the service.
	Money, standards and accountability systems are not the whole answer. Indeed, the latter may be counterproductive if they induce resentment at the lack of trust and the stress they produce. What is missing, I think, is a process to move the underlying attitude and consequently behaviour and conduct. The deficit we see in the present culture is that it is not rights-based; there is no permeating concept of entitlement. Services are managed for their own purpose, not for the citizen's purpose. Obtaining an entitlement can still be an adversarial and insensitive process. There are many thousands who will not claim benefits because it is humiliating.
	This is a sorry state of affairs in the world's first modern welfare state. A most interesting book on the relation between respect and inequality by the sociologist Richard Sennett sees some of the cause as the difficulty in a meritocracy for,
	"the strong to practise respect towards those destined to remain weak".
	He locates the manifestation of this particularly in the social services. Julian Le Grand, professor of social policy at the LSE, makes a complementary point when he says that, in the context of the monopoly power of the providers of public services,
	"there seems little respect; instead there is deference and resignation on one side, and indifference and condescension on the other".
	We need, he says, public policies,
	"that employ mechanisms which encourage respect for users".
	I would add that our libertarian preference for equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome means that we must enshrine respect as a public value. A culture of human rights is the safest route to that end.
	Why is it the safest? Primarily, in my opinion, because its basic text—the Human Rights Act—provides a framework for balancing conflicting rights. It can help public authorities—say, residential care homes—to make decisions where a patient's rights infringe those of the carer. It can help to define how far a right to confidentiality should go when there is an allegation of sexual abuse, or how far a disruptive pupil may interfere with the right to education of other pupils. Of particular importance, its internationally accepted provenance makes it the surest way of reaching agreed social norms in a multicultural society.
	The culture of human rights is therefore inextricably also a culture of responsibilities. When someone I as a public servant deal with has a right to peaceful enjoyment of their possessions, I have a responsibility to not impair their enjoyment or to let others do so. Human rights culture does not protect only the rights of the vulnerable. It also produces socially responsible behaviour and thus social cohesion.
	Most of the authorities we examined, however, did not see human rights proactively as helping them to do their jobs better. The outstanding exception is the Audit Commission, whose recent publication, Human rights: Improving public service delivery, picks out the point that human rights can bring benefits to the service users. But the common approach was almost uniformly defensive, to check that the body was covered against legal challenge.
	Law suits are only the last resort in answer to the violations of human rights I have instanced. The then Lord Chancellor, my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine of Lairg, whom I am very pleased to see in his place, said to us in evidence that an indicator of a human rights culture was,
	"arriving at a state of affairs not where cases have multiplied but where cases are less frequent because public institutions have put their own houses in order".
	If amelioration is left to the courts it will be victim-led, patchy and reactive, as well as expensive for the public authority at fault and hence the taxpayer. Cultural change needs promotion. It needs a champion, as the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, said, with sufficient resources and enough powers to make it listened to.
	As the noble Lord, Lord Lester, said, an independent human rights and equality commission is necessary for that task. It could promote understanding of a non-legal response to human rights issues and an anti-litigious culture, including alternative dispute resolution. It could offer guidance. It could disseminate good practice. It could open debate on conflicts of rights. It could campaign. But if all this is to have bite, it needs teeth, as the noble Lord, Lord Lester, said. It needs, essentially, to be able to carry out free and fearless investigations of human rights problems, so as to know what is actually happening on the ground, to alert public opinion and to set its priorities for promotion and guidance accordingly. That is why, as the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, said, it should be answerable to Parliament rather than a department of state, and why it should have the powers to summon people and their documents.
	Some human rights commissions which we visited in other countries had also pursued individual cases, but there was a persuasive general feeling that a commission became bogged down if it had also this duty, so that it was side-tracked from a more strategic role of investigating generic problems and promoting change. There is one area of democratic deficit where I see a role for a commission. As a parliament we scrutinise European legislative proposals, perhaps not enough, but we do not subject proposed international instruments to any kind of scrutiny at all. Our governments, of whatever party, sign in our name treaties, covenants, conventions put forward by the United Nations, by the OECD, by the Council of Europe. They negotiate optional protocols to these instruments exclusively within the executive. A human rights and equality commission could inform itself of these human rights proposals, or of human rights aspects of any proposal, and publish opinions or otherwise draw Parliament's attention to the issues; and, of course, it could play a major role in examining UK compliance with such instruments.
	The relationship of a commission with democracy is inherently positive. When Mary Robinson gave evidence to our committee, she characterised the advantages of independent national human rights institutions in this way:
	"First of all, they supplement the basic institutions of democracy, because they are working with governments; they report to parliament; they are working with civil society . . . they build bridges between government and civil society".
	Thus a commission could assist the re-engagement of people with the political process as it took part in public decision-making about conflicts of interest and encourage social cohesion by so doing.
	Finally, much will be gained by having an equality and human rights commission combined. First of all, equality is one of the key human rights. It makes no sense to hive it off—and it could imperil its central role in human rights by making it the province only of those disadvantaged by unequal treatment. Human rights is for everybody and equality is as important to the majority as to minorities if we are to have a human rights culture which instils respect for the dignity and worth of the human person. Then there are cross-cutting issues of rights which compound different kinds of unequal treatment with other human rights considerations. Or there are abuses, such as domestic violence, with which the equality commissions cannot deal but which nevertheless have an equality dimension. And there are important practical considerations. We are talking about improving the performance of the public services. Is it not better to have one organisation issuing guidance rather than the present multiplicity of separate guidance, some of it even inconsistent, as the noble Lord, Lord Lester, persuasively set out?
	We have the chance of developing an institution which could transform our public service culture. I applaud the Government for seizing the opportunity and for setting up the task force and I hope that organisations and individuals will engage in the consultative process to create the right structure. I commend our report to the House.

Baroness Stern: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Prashar for initiating this debate, especially for going ahead with it with a broken arm and a damaged knee. Since the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights started producing reports I have become increasingly filled with admiration for its work. With the passing of the Human Rights Act a high point was reached in the British human rights environment. Since then it has sadly become a bit of a desert. The reports of the Joint Select Committee have been like flowers in that desert and they are all very helpful in reminding us that we have a range of domestic and international human rights obligations and that our observance of them is indeed patchy.
	In my contribution to this important debate on the shape and nature of a human rights commission I want to concentrate on questions of a human rights culture; how far we have one; how far we are lacking; and what the benefits are to individuals and to the staff in public services, when there is a vibrant, accessible human rights culture. I am glad to be following the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, who made that case so powerfully, based on her wealth of experience. The more detailed questions on the establishment of an equality and human rights commission I shall leave to those people better qualified than me. I shall not discuss the high profile matters connected to the threat of terrorism, where this country's human rights obligations have been such a casualty, to the great dismay of our many friends and admirers around the world.
	The most striking question regarding the situation in England and Wales from my perspective—the field of justice and human rights—is where is the ministry of justice? Noble Lords will be aware that when a raft of new countries joined our regional human rights body, the Council of Europe, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, their move to democracy and the rule of law was assisted by the Council of Europe. It was a requirement that the management of the their prison system should be transferred from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of Justice. Most countries did that. Russia did so in 1998 and it made an enormous difference to attitudes to the treatment of prisoners.
	The Council of Europe felt it to be quite wrong that prisons should be under the same roof in administrative terms as ministry of the interior functions such as the police, border control, immigration and other security functions. Yet prison management in England and Wales is still run by the ministry of the interior, which we call the Home Office, because we do not have a ministry of justice, which is in itself a major difficulty in providing a human rights culture. In Scotland—and I declare an interest as the Convenor of the Scottish Consortium on Crime and Criminal Justice—there is a Minister for Justice and a Justice Department. No doubt, some interesting comparisons could be made.
	I want to give just one example of the gross failure of human rights thinking to penetrate the walls of the Home Office and enter the consciousness of those who work there. I am thinking of the Government's response to the excellent 10th report of the Joint Select Committee on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The committee recommended removing all children under 18 from Prison Service custody into the care of people,
	"whose outlook is firmly grounded in a culture of respect for children's human rights, devoted to rehabilitation and care".
	That is a very appropriate recommendation, even if the conditions in which children are held in prison are not all as bad as those described by our excellent Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, who asks:
	"What is the rationale and proportionality of routinely strip-searching children on arrival in prison, particularly for a population more likely than the average to have experienced abuse? And if a child resists, can you justify him or her being held down by adults, in painful wristlocks, and forcibly undressed?".
	In its report on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Joint Select Committee does not say of incarcerated children under 18: "Let them all out"; it does not say: "Send them on Caribbean cruises"; it simply says that, when children are locked up, they should be locked up in an environment devoted to rehabilitation and care and where children's rights are respected.
	The Government's reply to that recommendation is deeply shocking and will be read with disbelief by people the world over concerned with the rights of children. I believe we must assume that these reports are read widely around the world because of the high international reputation of the members of the Joint Committee. The Government say that they do not accept the recommendation because:
	"Children who are in custody are not just children".
	So, one must ask, what are they? Are they monsters or demons? They are, the reply says, criminals. But the drafters of the Convention on the Rights of the Child knew that children could be criminals and that some children would commit acts against the law. That is why they included in the convention specific articles about how such children should be treated. When children are children, they are children, even if they have stolen a mobile phone on the street or burgled a house. The fact that the sentence,
	"Children who are in custody are not just children",
	could be drafted by a public official and could get through the various sieves that such papers go through shows a profound lack of human rights awareness throughout the system. We urgently need a human rights commission to start the process of sensitisation and training. We also need it urgently to support ordinary members of the public who feel that they have been deeply wronged by the state.
	The House may have heard of Joseph Scholes, a boy aged 16 years and one month, who committed suicide in Stoke Heath young offender institution at the beginning of a two-year sentence for involvement in stealing mobile phones. That sentence was given to him in spite of information provided to the court by many professionals about his very disturbed condition, his attempted suicide and his history of seriously harming himself. He cut his face 30 times, and there was so much blood that the walls of his room in the children's home where he lived had to be completely repainted.
	I was privileged to meet his mother at an event, attended by a number of Members of this House, to call for a public inquiry into Joseph's death. In talking to his mother, I realised again how deeply important a human rights culture can be in helping people who feel that they have been wronged to understand the meaning of what has happened to them.
	In coming to terms with her loss through contact with those involved in the case, Mrs Scholes has discovered the many human rights conventions that bind this country in which she lives. She has discovered the framework in which to understand her son's death: the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that, in dealing with children, the interests of the child should be paramount and that custody should be used as a last resort. She has discovered the duty of care that rests on any state which incarcerates a citizen. Ultimately, whatever conclusions are reached about that case, she now knows that the world community has standards and that, according to those standards, what happened to her son should not have happened. Another reason that we need a human rights commission is so that citizens who feel wronged can find out what the obligations of the state are and what their rights are within that state.
	I now wish to say a word about the great benefits that a human rights approach can bring to those in public service. The most helpful report of the British Institute of Human Rights, which is a small but admirable organisation with scant resources that achieves a great deal, showed how important it is for those responsible for the care of others to be required to carry out their duties within a human rights context.
	I have had many opportunities, in many parts of the world, to be involved in programmes for training prison staff in human rights. Sometimes that opportunity has been due to the Human Rights Policy Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The work of the FCO in human rights is a great resource for other parts of government and one from which they could learn much.
	Prison staff training can be a superficial exercise where the staff sit sulking, listening to people talk about the rights of prisoners and muttering, "What about the rights of the staff?". That is often a very fair point but, if it is done well, human rights training can be something else entirely. It can be a powerful explanation of the complexity and professionalism of the work of prison staff and of others who care for vulnerable people. It can help them to see that their job of treating well and with respect people who have greatly harmed society or who may be despised by society is an immensely exacting job requiring great skill. It is a high-status, professional job. Through that job, people express the values of society. Respecting the dignity and humanity of those who have done wrong, those who are vulnerable or those whom no one else cares about makes a contribution in itself to our level of civilisation and reaffirms the ethical framework within which we live. That is another argument for a human rights commission, which would work to inject a human rights approach into our public services.
	I could not agree more with one conclusion of the sixth report:
	"Such a culture of respect for human rights could help create a more humane society, a more responsive government and better public services. It could help to deepen and widen democracy. It is a goal worth striving for".
	I look forward to a powerful, well resourced, strategic and interventionist commission with many teeth being established as soon as possible.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Laird, will forgive me for a moment. Perhaps I may draw the attention of the House to the fact that on Fridays we aim to complete our business as close as possible to four o'clock. At the present rate of progress, we shall be lucky to finish before seven o'clock. Therefore, I ask for contributions to be as brief as possible, even in this very important debate.

Lord Laird: My Lords, noble Lords will be pleased to know that my contribution will be somewhat limited. I join other noble Lords in complimenting the noble Baroness on her presentation of the report. I also agree with a great deal of the report. I am particularly interested in a number of the points that she raised. I was struck by her words that we must not let human rights simply be an activity for human rights lawyers; we must ensure that they expand into society.
	Another theme in the debate was the concept of education and changing the climate. I am very much of the opinion that that is the way forward. Human rights are not for people on this corner or that corner; they are for everyone. We must develop a situation in which human rights are not seen to be a threat or something that causes difficulty or as being only for a small section or a minority. No matter how one does the sums, whether one is a member of a majority or a minority and wherever one is, throughout the kaleidoscope of the population we are all supported by human rights and we should all support them.
	I am more in favour of the educational approach to promoting human rights than the heavy-handed approach of continual interventionism. I am convinced that, as reflected during the debate, governments do not like human rights mechanisms. That is not because they are opposed to human rights; it is simply because they do not like people interfering with their right to govern. We have seen that all over the place.
	I come from a part of the United Kingdom which has had experience of a human rights commission—Northern Ireland. Unfortunately, we got off to the worst possible start by having a perceived non-representative Human Rights Commission which tied itself into all kinds of knots. It has caused considerable difficulties with the concept of human rights for many people in Northern Ireland.
	As a human rights activist I have attended meetings in Northern Ireland of human rights groups and I have had the point put to me that I should not be there because I am not an Irish Republican. That is totally unacceptable, but it shows a mindset and one must catch such matters at the beginning. People must understand that the only qualification for human rights is to be human.
	I am not sure that using the example of the Irish Republic is a suitable basis for discussing the activities of a human rights commission. Six years after the Belfast agreement, grudgingly and slowly starting off with the Human Rights Commission, I believe we know much about human rights abuses in the Irish Republic. Any state that requires a qualification in Irish to get planning permission has a certain difficulty with human rights. I have a difficulty with the Human Rights Commission in the Irish Republic because it has refused to admit to its membership anyone of the Irish Government's national minority.

Lord Lester of Herne Hill: My Lords, to avoid any possible misunderstanding, I was referring to the Irish Human Rights Commission, not in any way to bless Irish human rights practices or anything of that kind, but simply to refer to the powers given to it by the Irish Parliament, and to say that our commission should have no fewer powers.

Lord Laird: My Lords, I am delighted with that intervention. I accept that totally.
	We of the Northern Irish viewpoint, with the nasty experience that we have had, would like to look forward to a fresh start. Perhaps we could be involved in the new United Kingdom mechanisms and machinery, which would be a much more satisfactory operation from our viewpoint. We have to ensure that the commission is accepted by the majority of people, whoever they may be. It must be representative of the community and report back to Parliament, not to government. I look forward to the day when we in Northern Ireland can make a fresh start.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I crave leave to speak in the gap. In a debate to take note of this report, I suggest that noble Lords should also take note of the draft report of Mr Richard Shepherd, pages 91 to 98, which, had I been a member of the committee, I would have supported. I would have opposed the setting up of the commission for the reasons that were given some time ago by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, which I thought were totally right, that it would undermine the legislative process and was not necessary. On page 89 one can see the kind of proposals to which objection should be taken: to be able to promote access to alternatives to litigation; to be able to apply to the courts for permission to appear; to be able to intervene as a third party in legal proceedings; to provide assistance to individuals; to be able to take cases in its own name; and to be able to seek judicial review.
	In four minutes one cannot go into detail, but in essence, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, was totally right in his view and for that reason—perhaps it is good to import some balance into the debate—I would oppose the setting up of a commission.
	Within the timescale, the problem was well put and well reasoned at page 94 of the report, in paragraphs 12 to 17, by Mr Richard Shepherd, and it marries in substance with the view expressed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, some time ago. That being the problem, I ask noble Lords to look at two conclusions on page 95 in paragraphs 22 and 24. Paragraph 22 states:
	"It should be understood that Plato's Guardians sitting as a Court in Strasbourg do not secure our liberties. The custodians of our freedom are the people themselves . . . through the institutions—both Houses of Parliament".
	Paragraph 24 ends with the words:
	"The Court's judgements form part of our law"—
	that is the Court of Human Rights—
	"far beyond any reading of the Convention Rights. This framework circumvents what has been traditionally our constitutional process. In detaching accountability for law from the consent of the governed it undermines the central purpose of our legislative process".
	That is the other side of the coin. This is a debate and there should be some balance.

Lord Goodhart: My Lords, I welcome this report and the debate. I am most grateful, as I am sure we all are, to the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, for introducing it.
	The subject of human rights is one of the great political success stories of the period since World War II. It started with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which did not create binding legislation but was a declaration of common principles. The European Convention on Human Rights was ratified by the United Kingdom in 1951 and was largely drafted by British lawyers, including Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, later Lord Kilmuir. The European Convention on Human Rights was made much more effective for citizens of the United Kingdom by the acceptance in 1966 of the right of the individual to petition the European Court of Human Rights.
	At one time, the United Kingdom was one of the states most frequently held in breach of rights under the convention. We learned from that the lesson that we had become complacent about the protection of human rights by our domestic law. We were not nearly as good as we thought we were.
	Then came the Human Rights Act 1998, which makes convention rights enforceable in the United Kingdom courts. That was an enormous step forward. It is a monument to the work of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg. I join with my noble friend Lord Lester of Herne Hill in paying tribute to him for that. I also pay tribute to my noble friend himself who has dedicated decades of his life to trying to create a human rights Act for the United Kingdom.
	To some extent matters have gone quiet since then. At page 6 the Joint Committee said:
	"We have not found evidence of the rapid development of awareness of a culture of respect for human rights and its implications throughout society, and what awareness there is often appears partial or ill-informed. We fear that the highwater mark has been passed, and that awareness of human rights is ebbing, both within public authorities and within the public at large".
	That may perhaps be too gloomy a conclusion. At the time of the Human Rights Act some of us feared something different: that a flood of cases would be brought under the Act, most of which would have no real hope of success and which would simply overwhelm the courts, as happened in Canada, when their Charter of Rights and Freedoms was introduced. It was also feared that there would be a backlash against the Human Rights Act, instigated by the tabloids and based on decisions that offended populist views.
	Those fears have by and large been unfulfilled. The legal profession and the courts have reacted cautiously and sensibly. Few decisions have created a public outcry. The result is that the Human Rights Act has now largely merged into the system and is no longer seen as being particularly novel or revolutionary.
	There is still some resistance to the Human Rights Act, especially in some sections of the Conservative Party, as demonstrated by Mr Richard Shepherd on the Joint Committee—although by no other member—and by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, in the brief speech that he has just made. However, I believe that the Human Rights Act is sufficiently entrenched to make it—at the very least—extremely difficult to repeal. I shall wait with interest to see what the noble Lord, Lord Henley, says about the Act when reflecting on the present views of the Conservative Party.
	I entirely agree with the committee that what we now need is effectively a relaunch. Now that the Human Rights Act is in effect part of the scenery, we need to make both public authorities and citizens conscious of it.
	Perhaps I may read one other quotation from the report. The committee stated:
	"It is clear to us that, by and large, public authorities, and those who inspect, advise and audit them, do not give a high priority to placing respect for human rights at the heart of their policies and practices. Insufficient energy is being given to communicating a vision to public authorities to help them understand how a culture of respect for human rights might look or how it could be delivered".
	That, I believe, is all too true. My party—the Liberal Democrats—at our last party conference adopted a recommendation that all local authorities should appoint someone to act as a human rights officer. It would not necessarily be a full-time job and would normally be combined with other duties; but there should be someone in each local authority responsible for receiving information on human rights from the Department for Constitutional Affairs and the human rights commission—when it is created—and other bodies, and who ensures that the local authority not only complies with human rights legislation but actively promotes human rights.
	That is an example of one way to encourage the development of the human rights culture in this country. More widely, I believe that the creation of a human rights commission is essential if the good intentions behind the Human Rights Act are to become reality. As the report states in paragraph 99:
	"A culture of respect for human rights cannot be developed through the courts alone".
	We must have a human rights commission to give full effect to the Act.
	I agree very much with the recommendations in the report for the role of the human rights commission. There is, of course, an important public relations role through the promotion of human rights culture and education in human rights.
	The commission should be able to conduct public inquiries on human rights issues. That is a duty of human rights commissions in a number of Commonwealth countries—Australia, India and South Africa. The commission should be able to inquire into any practices within any public authority that appear not to comply with human rights standards and to report on the results of its inquiry.
	More difficult is the question of providing advice and assistance in individual cases. I agree that the commission should not normally do that directly. That would divert it from its real role of leadership and the promotion of human rights. But it should be able to support and help with the provision of advice and assistance by others—in particular by voluntary organisations—and by lawyers in private practice.
	The commission should certainly have power to intervene and, with the leave of the court, to submit an amicus brief in cases which raise important human rights issues. Other organisations already do that; for example, Justice.
	The committee was divided on whether the commission should have power to give direct assistance to parties in strategic cases. I believe that this power is in fact greatly needed where the case raises important issues that would otherwise not reach a court or, if it did, would not be adequately presented.
	The question whether the human rights commission should be a free-standing commission or part of a single human rights and equality commission is difficult and controversial. The Government are already planning to go ahead with a single equality commission to cover the responsibilities presently exercised by the Equal Opportunities Commission, the Commission for Racial Equality and the Disability Rights Commission.
	Much of the work of the equality commission will be human rights work. The report shows the extent of the wide overlap between them. Like the committee, I would prefer to see a single human rights and equality commission. I agree, however, with my noble friend Lord Lester that it must not be an amalgamation but a new, powerful, independent and properly funded body.
	I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, that the human rights commission should report on the human rights implications of foreign treaties, conventions and other obligations, which, by agreement, the United Kingdom proposes to enter into, in the exercise of the prerogative power. I agree very strongly indeed with the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, that we should have a ministry of justice and that the present provisions for the custody of children in this country are deeply flawed and do not comply with international standards.
	As I said at the beginning, human rights have largely been a success story. But there are, I believe, other and darker changes in modern times in our society. I fear that we are becoming a more brutal and vindictive society. Violence is fuelled by alcohol. We see such things as the adulation by a section of the public of Tony Martin for shooting dead an unarmed teenage burglar who was running away from him. We have the constant call for ever longer sentences when we in this country already impose tougher sentences than most—if not all—other EU countries. That is another reason why human rights are more important than ever.
	A human rights commission should have been set up when the Human Rights Act came into force; but our need for it now is as great as, if not greater than, when it was enacted.
	We welcome the report and very much hope that the Government will accept and act on it.

Lord Henley: My Lords, mindful of the strictures of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, I shall keep my remarks as brief as possible. I should say to the Government that this report, which we all agree is a very important report—issued I believe on 3 March 2003, almost a year ago—should not have been relegated to a Friday morning; it should really have been debated on some other occasion. Perhaps the noble and learned Lord could respond on why a report of such importance has been left so late and to a Friday almost a year after it was issued.
	I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, on introducing this very important debate, again bearing in mind that I should have been happier if the debate had been held on another day and sooner. In passing, I offer my commiserations on her broken arm. I offer my congratulations to the members of the committee on all their work and on the fact that they were able to reach a conclusion, albeit with one dissenting voice.
	The committee concluded that there was an overwhelming case for establishing a commission. It described the case as "compelling". It stated that Her Majesty's Government, having introduced the Human Rights Act, hoped that it would help "nurture",
	"a 'culture of understanding of rights and responsibilities' in the UK".
	Having introduced it, they had a duty to take matters further. As the report argues, such a culture is in danger of stalling if a human rights commission is not created to promote actively such a culture.
	The Government obviously have a duty of leadership. As the report put it:
	"If it wills the end, it must also will the means".
	Again, the point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, and others, that whatever is created must be given adequate resources.
	The question must then be put to the Government of what sort of commission should be established. There are arguments in favour of merging the existing equality commissions with a new human rights commission. The noble Lord, Lord Lester, made some strong points against merely doing so. There are also arguments in favour of creating a separate commission purely dealing with human rights and leaving the others as they are. No doubt we shall shortly hear from the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor exactly what the Government propose. I hope that we will hear a little more detail than we did last October about the merging of those bodies with a new human rights commission.
	Before we do so, I shall make one or two points. We first need to decide whether a commission is necessary at all and at this stage. As has been pointed out, the committee argued that the case is compelling. There are, however, contrary views, which were put before the committee. The committee itself cited a number of them, including that a commission with extensive regulatory, adjudicative or coercive powers exercised without a process of accountability may well usurp the proper functions of some or all three parts of the constitution: the executive, Parliament and the courts.
	The committee also heard the argument that a commission might simply duplicate the work of other bodies, such as the Joint Committee itself, the Home Office, the Human Rights Task Force and various non-governmental organisations. Another argument was that an independent body charged with promoting human rights might also increase the risk of further challenges to the needs of the state, especially if it sided with contentious cases, taking an oppositionist stand. It also heard the idea of a "wait and see" approach, giving the Human Rights Act 1998 a little more time to bed down to ensure that a commission is established to meet an actual need, rather than creating a new one. I appreciate that the committee did not accept those arguments, but I should be grateful to hear again the Government's view on whether that is the right way to proceed.
	Having addressed the question of whether the commission is necessary or desirable—and whether it is necessary or desirable now—the next question is obviously what sort of commission we are talking about. I imagine that that question has to be taken alongside the first. I am sure that we would all agree that the wrong sort of commission might well be worse than no commission at all.
	Again, I note the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, about whether it was desirable to merge existing equality commissions with a new human rights commission. Here I welcome many of the committee's comments in its summary on page 8, when it discusses powers and functions. I especially welcome its statement in the first paragraph:
	"Nor should it be a body with an adversarial or litigious approach to its mission".
	The second paragraph states that its principal purpose must be to promote a human rights culture and,
	"to promote human rights in public authorities in the delivery of services".
	I welcome that, and the statement in the third paragraph that:
	"It would need to offer guidance to, and promote best practice in, public authorities in relation to human rights".
	The report continues:
	"It should not itself be driven by the task of handling individual complaints".
	The committee also—here I declare an interest as someone involved in mediation—states its desire to promote alternative dispute resolution procedures, which,
	"might provide a remedy for violations or potential violations of rights in appropriate circumstances".
	In passing, anything that keeps matters out of the hands of the lawyers and the courts is certainly to be welcomed.
	I was slightly more worried by the comments in the final paragraph of that section on powers and functions, where the committee mentions the commission playing,
	"a valuable role in assisting the courts in determining human rights questions".
	I hope that it would not usurp the rights of the courts, because in the end, it must be for the courts themselves to determine the case, but if the committee is merely envisaging the commission acting,
	"as a friend of the court or as a third party intervener",
	that may be desirable.
	I also welcome the committee's desire that any commission should be accountable to Parliament and that Parliament be consulted on appointments. Again in passing, I noted the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, on the possible appointment of some individual as chairman of some future commission—that individual being, as he put it, someone relatively close to the Government. We would all welcome a response from the noble and learned Lord on that point.
	Lastly, I should welcome hearing the noble and learned Lord's views on all other matters relating to the Joint Committee's report and hope that although it is almost 11 months after the publication of the report, we can have a full and detailed response.

Lord Falconer of Thoroton: I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, on securing this debate. I especially welcome it for two reasons. First, the sixth report of the Joint Committee is a very important report. Noble Lords will know that the Government have already accepted its central recommendation. Securing a debate today gives everyone an opportunity to mark that occasion, but also to discuss the detail of what follows. I welcome the opportunity to answer the specific points raised.
	I also welcome the opportunity to reaffirm the Government's commitment not just to the principle of the Human Rights Act 1998 but to the culture of human rights, which forms such an important plank in the report.
	I also join noble Lords who have paid tribute to my predecessor, my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine of Lairg in relation to human rights in three particular respects. Without his personal commitment there would not have been a Human Rights Act; secondly, separately from his commitment to the principle, it was he who thought of the method by which it was introduced; and, thirdly, without his drive to get it through Parliament, it would not have occurred. So I welcome the tributes paid to him.
	The House will know that the committee spent two years, from March 2001 to March 2003, conducting the inquiry that led to the report. That is testimony to the care taken about the report and its importance. In the course of the inquiry, the committee took evidence from a considerable range of people, including the then United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, my predecessor as Lord Chancellor, my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine of Lairg, the three chairs of the equality commissions and others besides, including a great many written submissions.
	The work done for the report was immense, comprehensive and far-reaching. That care demonstrates that Parliament was right not to rush to a conclusion in respect of a human rights commission in the course of passing what became the Human Rights Act 1998. Instead, Parliament set up the Joint Committee, suggesting that one of its first tasks might be to inquire into issues such as the relationship with the equality commissions. The Government undertook at the time to give any recommendation of the committee in that respect the most careful consideration.
	As I have said, and as is well known to the House, the committee's concluding recommendation in its sixth report was that the Government move to create an integrated commission for equality and human rights. On 30 October 2003, we made it clear that we accepted that central recommendation. It was in no small part a reflection of the work of the Committee that that decision came about. The noble and wholly committed Members of this House who serve on that committee, many of whom have taken part in this debate, together with the Members of the other Place, can feel justly pleased in their work, and this House in them. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, in paying tribute to the committee chairman, Jean Corston, and the committee Clerk, who made such a fantastic contribution.
	The decision to create a commission for equality and human rights in Great Britain sends out an important signal, not only to those in the United Nations and elsewhere in the international community, but also to the people of this country, that we are wholly committed to human rights. I have heard it said by some that they think this Government regret the passage of the Human Rights Act 1998, or even that we have resiled from our aim to build a culture of respect for human rights in this country. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let the decision to accept the principal recommendation of the 6th report of the Joint Committee stand as an emphatic rebuttal to those who make that claim.
	The commission will be a significant development in the protection and promotion of equality, and for the elimination of discrimination. I accept that that carries with it very many questions, not least of which is the relationship between equality and human rights within the body, a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill. I hope that noble Lords will agree that, while equality is always about dignity, dignity is not always about equality; in other words, human rights include but go beyond equality issues. That is to be reflected in the new body; therefore, human rights will not be a seventh strand but will inform and support the six equality strands. It will be a free-standing subject for the body to promote whether or not there is a linked equality issue.
	Thus the new commission will embrace the principle that equality is a fundamental human right. It will draw together, not only the existing equality protections, but will make provision for the new strands of protection: age, religion or belief and sexual orientation. I have no doubt that having human rights will enable the body to weave them together very effectively.
	That decision, proposed by the Joint Committee, also serves to bring to an end the artificial distinction between equality and human rights that has existed in this country. That was a distinction without a difference, and one that seemed to ignore, or forget, that it was in the horrors of the Second World War, involving so much discrimination and persecution of minorities, that were found the reasons for the drawing-up of the international human rights instruments, in which British lawyers had so much to contribute.
	However, I also agree with the points made by many noble Lords that human rights are not just for lawyers, and not just about the needs of minorities, but are relevant to every person in this country. I agree fully with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Laird, that they are not for one group in this corner, or one group in that corner, but for the whole community. I agree fully with the point made by my noble friend Lady Whitaker that they affect how public services are delivered. They affect, for example, how elderly relatives might be treated by our health services, how housing decisions might be made or how the mentally unwell might be treated. In short, they apply to everybody and to everyday situations.
	Of course, the Human Rights Act was used to provide a remedy in domestic courts for any breaches of the convention rights. However, we did not intend just that there be a compliance culture in this country. As many noble Lords will remember from the debates as the Bill was going through Parliament, and as was repeated by the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, what was hoped for over and above legal compliance was the development of a culture of rights and responsibilities centred on our public services.
	How is that culture to be defined? I can do no better than to read an extract from the Joint Committee's 6th report:
	"A culture of respect for human rights would exist when there was a widely-shared sense of entitlement to these rights, of personal responsibility and of respect for the rights of others, and when this influenced all our institutional policies and practices".
	I shall read one further quote, part of which was cited by the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, to emphasise why the creation of such a culture matters:
	"This would help create a more humane society, a more responsive government and better public services, and could help to deepen and widen democracy by increasing the sense amongst individual men and women that they have a stake in the way in which they are governed. For these and other reasons we believe a culture of respect for human rights is a goal worth striving for".
	We agree strongly with that. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, referred to the contrary view expressed by Mr Richard Shepherd in his well-reasoned minority report. We prefer the reasoning of the majority on the Joint Committee; that is why we accepted their central conclusion.
	Perhaps I may deal with the specific points, as there is a long way to go in getting the commission up and running. First, I agree entirely that the body must be independent, and it must be seen to be so. I do not think that special arrangements such as those that apply to the National Audit Office need to be created to achieve that. By way of example, let us consider the Disability Rights Commission—would people regard that as not being independent? I give to the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, the assurance that I gave in Parliament previously: a proper process in accordance with Nolan principles will be followed before the appointment of the chairman and other members, and there is no such intention as he indicated.
	Secondly, we all agree that the body must be properly resourced to be effective. I anticipate that there might be disagreements in the future on what constitutes sufficient resources, but we would all agree on the principle that there must be sufficient resources.
	Thirdly, the noble Lord, Lord Lester, was supported by others in making the point that the commission's law enforcement functions must be carried out to the best of its ability. I agree entirely. The dead weight of the past must not be allowed to influence the way in which those powers are enforced. That reflects the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, that the commission must not be seen as simply a merger of existing organisations, but as a wholly new body that looks at the issues in a new way. I agree with that, and that it will affect the way in which the commission carries out its law enforcement functions.
	I agree that the commitment to human rights must not dilute activity to combat discrimination. I also agree that all discrimination must be fought. Of course some prioritisation must take place, but that must be in the context of the commission's being responsible for all the discriminations covered.
	The noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, put a case for trying to introduce a single equality Act, if we have a single equality and human rights body. We must determine what the priorities are in a demanding legislative programme. We do not believe that such an Act is needed to make progress on the sorts of things that the commission can deliver. I would not like it to be thought that we need such an Act in order for the commission to make progress. We hear the case that is made; we have no immediate proposals to introduce such a Bill. However, we will continue to look at the desirability of ongoing alterations to legislation, particularly the desirability of an opportunity to introduce a positive duty on gender discrimination. But we believe that our current priority should be to deliver a new commission that actually works.
	Several noble Lords asked whether the mandate of the body would go beyond the mainstream rights referred to in the ECHR. The Government have not decided that the new body would be strictly confined to the ECHR. We are in listening mode on that point as on others. As I told the committee when I gave evidence on the topic just before the Christmas Recess, I can certainly see the argument for addressing human rights defined in a broad inclusive sense, but I also made it clear that, inevitably, priority would have to be given to those rights covered by the ECHR.
	The noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, went a little too far when he ruled out all additional powers relating to human rights litigation. The report said that promotional activity was the main human rights issue. But we are looking at those issues.

Lord Lester of Herne Hill: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord for giving way. Just to be absolutely accurate, as I am sure the noble and learned Lord appreciates, our committee started a consultation on additional powers, but the Government then took their decision. As far as I can recall, we did not reach any concluding view, although we had representations on the additional powers.

Lord Falconer of Thoroton: My Lords, I agree with that, and I hope that there will be an opportunity in the process that is going on at the moment. It connects with the point that I was about to make. The noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, referred to the task force. It is worth saying what the terms of reference of the task force are. It is to meet over a period of 12 months to advise the Government on the role, functions, priorities and activities of the proposed Commission for Equality and Human Rights, in furtherance of the Government's statement of 30 October on future arrangements for equality institutions in Great Britain. It is also to provide such advice in preparation for a White Paper and to provide ongoing policy advice including assessment of responses to the White Paper on the range of issues described above.
	Noble Lords know that the task force is in operation and has now met twice. Its proceedings and membership are available on the website of the Women and Equality Unit. We aim to publish the White Paper around April this year. As I said to the committee when I gave evidence, I would very much welcome the committee—everyone else as well, but particularly the committee—staying close to what the task force is doing, in order to deal with issues about, for example, powers, and the precise nature of the rights to be covered, so that that can be included in the White Paper.
	Having regard to the time, it would not be right for me to say anything more, save to say how grateful we are for what the report said, and that we have acted on it. There is a long way to go, but I hope that we have demonstrated our continuing commitment to the Human Rights Act 1998 and to the development of a human rights culture.

Baroness Prashar: My Lords, I begin by thanking all noble Lords who have contributed to this stimulating and positive debate. I am also pleased that there has been such a positive response from the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor. It is important to register that the consultation is ongoing, and that the task force will undertake its work. Therefore, the debate must go on. As the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, said, we are consulting on two or three of the issues in terms of the powers, so it is important that those deliberations continue. I see this report as the start of a dialogue and a discussion, and I hope that we will get a commission that has teeth and will be effective. It would be a great pity if we got a commission that was pragmatic and did not really have an impact.
	One could say that the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and I, have a vested interest as we were members of the committee, but I found the contribution by my noble friend Lady Stern compelling, because she was reflecting back to us what we had said. The case was strongly made why there is a need to create a respectful culture of human rights. I am mindful of the dissenting voices, which are fully recorded in the report, but we also took the view, as the Government have, that a commission is needed with some urgency. I hope that in the course of the work of the task force we will begin to generate a climate where public authorities and staff are preparing for such a culture and not just waiting for the commission to be established. I commend this Motion to the House.

On Question, Motion agreed to.

Smoking in Public Places (Wales) Bill [HL]

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time.
	I am most grateful to the Government for giving time for the Second Reading of my Bill. I am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, and the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, are to speak today, for they have done a great deal to highlight the problems of passive smoking and to keep this issue alive in this House. Many others have also contributed, and by not mentioning them by name I do not wish in any way to underplay the contribution that they have made. I declare my medical professional interest in the problems created by tobacco.
	I will briefly remind your Lordships of the dangers of passive smoking but will concentrate on why the National Assembly for Wales should be given the powers that it has requested. The noble Lord, Lord Elis-Thomas, who is Presiding Officer of the Assembly, referred to the powers in his supplementary question to the Minister on 12 March last year. In reply, the Minister said:
	"Wales has made a decision in principle that it would like to have such a measure and the matter is before the Secretary of State for Wales".—[Official Report, 12/3/03; col. 1307.]
	Second-hand smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals, including benzene, formaldehyde, arsenic, ammonia and hydrogen cyanide. Levels of airborne nicotine in public places range from 1 to 1,000 microgrammes per cubic metre of air. The impact on the risk of lung cancer and, in particular, coronary heart disease from average levels of smoke pollution cannot be ignored. A British study showed nicotine intake among non-smoking adults working in bars with natural ventilation from open windows to be equivalent to smoking half a cigarette a day. In New South Wales, a study showed that, after four or more hours at work in licensed premises, non-smoking employees had four times the level of carbon monoxide of those who worked in a smoke-free workplace. A third of those passive smokers working in bars had carbon monoxide levels consistent with light smoker status.
	Apart from the increased risk of coronary heart disease and lung cancer, precipitation of asthma and decreased fertility in adults, there is a particular risk to children. A sickle cell crisis can be provoked by exposure to environmental smoke. Cot deaths, asthma, chest infections and ear disease are all more prevalent in children exposed to environmental smoke. In the words of Jane Hutt, Minister for Health and Social Services in Wales,
	"Smoking in the presence of children, particularly in confined spaces, can inflict damage to their health that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives".
	Wales has a particular problem with tobacco-related disease. Seven thousand people in Wales are killed each year by tobacco smoke. Thousands more are disabled by exposure to it. The deaths and disease are concentrated in the most disadvantaged communities, and the Assembly has been doing all within its current powers to decrease smoking, particularly among the young. But voluntary measures have failed.
	Technically, my Bill is a skeleton Bill to allow the National Assembly for Wales to ban smoking of tobacco by any person in a public place in Wales. The power includes discretion for the Assembly to make regulations applying different provisions for different purposes or different cases. That includes the discretion to stage the timing of implementation and specification of places to which such regulations apply.
	There are 60,000 employers in Wales; over 45,000 employ fewer than 10 people. By contrast, the NHS is the largest employer in Wales, with all the healthcare premises that are, of course, open to the public. The Assembly, under my Bill, could make a series of regulations. They could be applied in such a way as to ensure that businesses have time to prepare, so that they are not economically destabilised, while being applied immediately to ensure that NHS staff do not smoke at work and are not exposed to the smoke created by others in their workplace, without denying patients in hospices, for example, a pleasure.
	The proposal comes from the Assembly itself. It has power under the Government of Wales Act 1998 to consider and make appropriate representations about any matter affecting Wales. Standing orders enable the Assembly to propose to Parliament that primary legislation on a specific matter affecting Wales should be passed. Those regulation-making powers have a number of precedents. Local authorities have powers to make by-laws for the good rule and government of their area under Section 235 of the Local Government Act 1972. Prior to the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, local authorities used that power to regulate the consumption of intoxicating liquor in public places in their area. They still use the power to control such matters affecting public health as spitting. Prohibition of spitting is found in almost every local authority set of by-laws in England and Wales, which define the specific local public places where the prohibition applies.
	In Wales, as in England, there are many by-laws made under the Open Spaces Act 1906, which have a public health background. To give examples that may seem trivial: one may not spit on the walls, floor or ceiling of a public carriage in Great Grimsby; nor may one tether a goat in Bute Park, Cardiff. But passive smoking is no trivial matter. I hope that your Lordships can see that my Bill is not empowering the Assembly to do anything that does not have precedents in the powers of local authorities. The Assembly already has wider provisions, which I will explain, but my Bill does not attempt to reflect those.
	Noble Lords will recall that Section 72 of the Government of Wales Act empowers the Assembly to create offences. Under Standing Orders, it can create a register of interests, it can require Members to specify that they have interests before participating in a debate, and can prohibit them from participating or voting. If breach of any of the Standing Orders is shown, the person is guilty of an offence, carrying a penalty of a fine up to level 5. Incidentally, if the Bill proceeds to Committee, I intend to lower the offence to be, "to a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale", and omitting imprisonment. This uses the wording of Section 72(7) from the Government of Wales Act 1998.
	The Assembly already determines penalties. The Environment Act 1995 empowers the Assembly to make regulations about air quality, including the control of vehicle emissions and the associated level of penalty for a breach. The level was not specified in the original Act. My Bill is not as far reaching because the powers to control the level of fine are contained in the Bill, not delegated as a power for the Assembly to determine.
	The National Assembly for Wales has powers to specify in statutory instrument how a breach of the regulations will be tried and the penalties for such an offence. For example, following the Food Safety Act 1990, the Assembly stated the offences and associated penalties from food contamination, and that an offender would be tried in a magistrates' court. However, the Assembly could have specified that such offences should be tried in the Crown Court instead.
	The National Assembly for Wales, like a Minister in England, can specify in regulations exactly what breach or breaches constitute a criminal offence. The Assembly has done that. Following the Care Standards Act 2000, that is seen variously in regulations on residential family centres and those on fostering services in Wales. Those did not have to mirror regulations in England, neither were they subject to parliamentary procedure at Westminster. Instead, under devolution, they were subject to debate and approval in plenary by the Assembly itself. The Assembly can specify which breaches of its regulations constitute an offence, specifically in Wales, as seen in the regulations on pigs with blue tongue. Those powers followed the National Assembly for Wales (Transfer of Functions) Order 1999.
	My Bill is much more restrictive. It allows the National Assembly for Wales only to state the places where smoking may not occur, but nothing more. That is equivalent to "good rule and government powers", which are by-law making powers.
	Local authorities have had powers since at least 1898, if not earlier under the Public Health Act 1875, to control activities in the interest of the public in their district as a whole or in whatever parts of the district they specified in their by-laws. I do not wish to bore noble Lords with further examples of the powers for subordinate legislation. I have given but a few. But it is worth remembering that regulations against, for example, spitting in certain places, have been in existence for more than 100 years. That is not primary legislation by the back door.
	I have the greatest respect for the Select Committee on Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform. I hope that, in the light of the examples that I have given, it may see fit to reconsider its comments on my Bill in its third report. The ability to make by-laws by "good rule and government powers" under the Local Government Act 1972, and the other regulation-making powers that I have referred to under the various Acts, all give powers to make subordinate legislation in the interest of public health. Whenever interest of public health arises there is a balance between individual freedom and respect for the interests of other members of the public who will be potentially affected by that individual exercising certain freedoms.
	Here we are balancing the individual's right to smoke tobacco wherever he or she chooses against the right of others, particularly the vulnerable, such as children and those working in public places, to breathe clean air and to avoid the well-documented and scientifically proven harms of passive smoking. We had an extensive debate on such issues when the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, brought forward his Bill on tobacco advertising and promotion.
	Exposure to environmental smoke in the workplace can already be controlled under Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and its regulations made in 1992. The Health and Safety Executive has the ability to make regulations whereby employers must ensure that there are arrangements to protect non-smokers from discomfort caused by tobacco smoke in rest rooms or rest areas. My Bill applies to public places, which are not covered by that Act. It provides the National Assembly for Wales with power to make regulations in relation to public places. For public places, it seems appropriate to give such regulation-making powers to the Assembly in light of its expressed wish to establish control of smoking over the whole of Wales.
	On 22 January 2003, a Motion was brought by Alun Pugh AM, now the Minister for culture and sport in the Welsh Cabinet, to recommend to Parliament the enactment of legislation prohibiting smoking in public places in Wales. Members of the Assembly were given a free vote and approved the resolution by 39 votes to 10 with majorities in all four parties in favour. All four party leaders and all four party health spokesmen voted for the resolution. The Assembly government supports the principle of this Bill. It is the first time that the Assembly has used the powers under Section 33 to make representations to Parliament for it to enact legislation appropriate to Wales. Would—indeed, should—this House seek to deny the clear wish of the democratically elected body who had an extensive debate in plenary and a free vote on the topic?
	The National Assembly for Wales has responsibility for matters relating to health. However, to improve the health of people in Wales, the Assembly needs to be able to tackle the problems that consumption of tobacco causes. If it cannot tackle the extensive problems of passive smoking, it is being asked to provide healthcare with one hand tied behind its back because, as I explained earlier, voluntary measures have been extensively implemented, but have failed to impact rapidly.
	The Assembly is investing heavily in cancer care, but we would be denying the Assembly its wish to tackle a major cause of cancer. Finland has shown that a legislative ban on smoking in public places results in a 10 per cent decrease in tobacco consumption overall. Experience in other parts of the world shows that this legislation would save the lives of smokers and non-smokers alike. In Scotland, the Scottish Parliament is exploring the issue.
	A precedent for my Bill comes from Ireland, where legislation has already been passed. Under Section 47 of the Irish Public Health (Tobacco) Act 2002, regulations can be made specifying places where smoking is prohibited. The public places in which it is prohibited are listed in the schedule to the Tobacco Smoking (Prohibition) Regulations No. 481 of 2003. They are very widely defined. It is worth noting that the Irish are using the ban as a positive marketing tool. With the slogan, "Dublin A Breath of Fresh Air", the industry is hoping to make 2004 a record year for visitor numbers, as Dublin's tourism research shows that 80 per cent of visitors will welcome the ban.
	I apologise if I seem to be exceeding time, but I checked earlier and was instructed that I had up to 20 minutes. For that, I apologise to the House. I shall try to summarise as quickly as I can.
	An online poll recently conducted by the Western Mail, Wales's main newspaper, ask the question: "Would you visit a smoke-free pub?". Twenty per cent responded saying, "No, because I smoke"; 11 per cent said that they would visit any pub that sold beer; while 69 per cent replied, "Yes, smoke-free air at last".
	It has been suggested that my Bill would set up a separate criminal justice system in Wales. It would not and could not do so. It simply allows that a breach of the regulations is punishable in the magistrates' court. I am tying into the existing criminal justice system, just as breaches of by-laws have been tied into the magistrates' courts system for the past 130 years.
	Powers under the Government of Wales Act 1998 allow the Assembly to make subordinate legislation without being subject to any Westminster parliamentary procedure. That is because it is a democratically elected body and quite different from a local authority that is elected to represent only a particular area. That is why by-law procedures have always been required to be subject to confirmation by a Minister in order to achieve some kind of uniformity. However, on the creation of the National Assembly for Wales, that confirming power was given to the Assembly in recognition of its standing as the body representing Wales as a whole. On that basis, my Bill would give powers to the National Assembly for Wales to make what in effect are by-laws for the whole of Wales.
	Being the National Assembly for Wales, this power has to be expressed in terms of a regulation-making power. The powers of the Assembly to make subordinate legislation are already much more extensive than those of local authorities. Local government cannot make by-laws on, for example, fostering, food contaminants, family centres and so forth.
	In essence, this Bill proposes to allow the National Assembly for Wales to make regulations over smoking tobacco in public places that have parallels in the by-law making powers of local authorities. It is of no consequence that the Assembly does not have devolved powers over the police force or the judicial system in Wales; neither do local authorities, which can create offences by making by-laws. I commend the Bill to the House.
	Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Baroness Finlay of Llandaff.)

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, perhaps I may emphasise to the House that we have a target rising time of 4 p.m. on Fridays. I recognise the difficulties and I quite appreciate the fact that, when introducing Bills, an extended time is allowed for the opening speaker. However, I hope that colleagues will be able to keep their speeches reasonably brief. We have two more Bills and an order to consider this afternoon. At the present rate of progress, we shall conclude our business at closer to seven o'clock than four o'clock.

Viscount Simon: My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, is to be congratulated on her detailed description of this Bill, on the depth of her knowledge of the subject and on bringing this matter once more out into the open.
	I should declare a personal interest in that I am severely asthmatic, and it is from the viewpoint of people with asthma that I speak. I am delighted that the National Asthma Campaign has provided me with some facts and figures in addition to those received from other interested parties.
	Perhaps it is worth mentioning—in case certain noble Lords might have noticed my erratic behaviour—that when I see a noble Lord with pipe, cigar or cigarette in hand in your Lordships' House, I will about turn and go in the opposite direction—sometimes at the double, in order to avoid an asthma attack. For some types of tobacco smoke I need only minor medication, while for others I need very rapid medical attention and oxygen.
	Smokers maintain that it is their right to smoke where they wish. I would agree with that. But it is also the right of non-smokers to be able to inhale air not polluted with tobacco smoke. People who are addicted to tobacco products are now in a minority in this country, but this minority is involved with the only product which, if taken in accordance with the manufacturers' instructions, can cause death. Those who boast that they have smoked all their lives and are still healthy at an advanced age are lucky to be alive. They are the exceptions.
	Let me kill one myth: a no-smoking area is not a smoke-free place; it is an area where tobacco smoke is present, but smokers are not. A no-smoking area can be likened to having a non-micturating area in a swimming-pool.
	Second-hand tobacco smoke is a killer. It has been estimated that at least 1,000 people die each year from exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke in the UK, yet some 3 million employees continue to have their health put at risk because of governments'—not only this one, but also previous administrations—continued reluctance to tackle smoking in the workplace. Yet a ban has been supported by the heads of all the British Royal Colleges of medicine and by the Chief Medical Officers for all parts of the UK.
	Let us look at the workplace. People exposed to second-hand smoke for six or more hours per week are 50 per cent more likely to develop asthma, and cigarette smoke is the second most common asthma trigger in the workplace. There is no comparable carcinogen where such widespread and uncontrolled exposure of workers and customers is permitted. People suffering serious exposure to second-hand smoke at work are three times more likely to have time off sick, with the obvious financial penalties suffered by employers with non-productive staff. I suspect that the time is rapidly approaching when employers will be sued by non-smokers for loss of earnings and compensation where the employer allows smoking in the workplace.
	Let us now look at how second-hand smoke affects people with asthma. Currently some 250,000 people in Wales receive treatment for asthma, and four out of five say that other people's smoke worsens their condition. Of this total number, 74,000 are children—enough to fill the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. For many of these people, disease means daily anxiety about how to avoid an asthma attack, while for some it is a matter of life and death. No cure is currently available.
	It is difficult to avoid second-hand smoke at work or at play, and asthmatics can develop more severe symptoms which add to the cost for the health service. Half of all people with asthma say that second-hand smoke can prevent them from socialising in pubs and restaurants. For those with more severe asthma, 44 per cent reported missing out when friends or family go out for a meal or for other entertainment. In my case, I cannot go to pubs, clubs, cinemas, theatres, concerts, restaurants or even use public transport in case I come across someone who will give me a severe allergic reaction in less than 20 seconds—in the worst scenario.
	The international tobacco cartels routinely claim that smoke-free public places will result in a downturn in trade—they say by around 30 per cent—yet this has never been demonstrated. Conversely, New York saw an increase of 10,000 jobs in the hospitality industry in the months following a ban on smoking. Further, those public houses in this country that have banned smoking have reported increased takings. Let us not forget my earlier remark that smokers are in a minority and, therefore, in those places where smoking is not permitted, any smokers vacating their places in a pub are being more than taken up by non-smokers. The inference I should like to draw is that such a ban would not hurt Welsh commerce at all.
	According to an opinion poll published last month in the Daily Telegraph, large numbers of smokers and non- smokers alike clearly support the idea that shops, restaurants, indoor shopping centres and the great majority of workplaces should become tobacco-free zones. They would favour legislation that would ban smoking where there was a clear risk that it could damage the health and well-being of others.
	I should like to quote from the annual report of the Uttlesford NHS Primary Care Trust, covering the area in which I live:
	"Smoking is still the biggest cause of preventable death in the UK. Smoking is very closely linked to the commonest type of lung cancer, and cancers of the mouth, nose, throat and oesophagus. It is a major factor in heart disease, peptic ulcer, bronchitis and emphysema, and contributes to the risk of bladder, cervical and other cancers. Smoking also causes changes to skin, particularly on the face where it causes coarse skin texture, premature ageing and wrinkling".
	I apologise for not addressing the substance of this Bill, but I thought that mentioning the problems experienced by many millions of people in this country due to the inhalation of second-hand tobacco smoke might be appropriate in this instance. I fully support this and any subsequent Bills that might be introduced at a later date. I wish it well and I look forward to being present when it receives Royal Assent.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I shall try to comply with the request from the Front Bench opposite. By convention, this Bill has to be given a Second Reading, and even if someone were to divide the House, I should give it one. I would do so because that is the convention. But I shall oppose it at a later stage. So, having made my position totally plain, I shall shorten my remarks.
	Perhaps I may begin on common ground. Let us put aside for one moment the medical evidence because it is a matter of dispute. The noble Viscount shakes his head but it is disputed. Let us not bother with that. Let us put it aside because I treat as common ground the fact that unavoidable inhalation of tobacco smoke in a place to which the public have access is unacceptable and noxious. I am sure that the noble Viscount agrees with that and I shall proceed on that basis. It is therefore totally irrelevant to consider in the debate why, what, when or where any noble Lord chooses to smoke or not to smoke.
	Although I am a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, I do not speak for anyone other than myself. I do not speak to a brief; I speak to my notes, which I made before I read the report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which no doubt the noble Viscount has read. The notes that I had made came to the same conclusions as those in the committee's report.
	The substance of the Bill raises sensitive issues involving the consideration of conflicting claims of personal freedom and public health. The committee takes the view, therefore, that many of the details of a ban are so significant that it is inappropriate to leave them all to subordinate legislation. This goes to the heart of the essence of the argument. In the light of that conclusion, the committee stated that it would not consider it proper for the matter to be delegated to a Minister in this jurisdiction. Those are the fundamental issues; not the dispute as to the medical evidence.
	Let me make one short point as to the merits of the Bill. The question is whether it affords an effective, proportionate and appropriate regime to prohibit what is noxious—that is, smoking in public places. But the Bill as yet does not specify the places to which it applies and to which the public has access for a variety of purposes. The fundamental objections are to the form in which a delegated power is granted to make regulations; to the creation of a contravention unless and until a request to desist has been made; and to the fact that a contravention is criminalised.
	It is a draconian Bill. If a contravention is to be dealt with by the courts at all—the Government do not take that view; they prefer self-regulation and voluntary agreements made with the Minister—why should it be dealt with by the criminal courts? Why draft "imprisonment" in the Bill? That is the frightening, aggravating and unnecessary approach which we are told should not be there and will be removed in Committee. Your Lordships may come to the conclusion that the Bill is not well conceived in a proportionate or appropriate manner in which to achieve its intendment.
	The voluntary approach of the Government is the effective and appropriate way to deal with the problem. The main concern relates to areas where people eat, drink, meet, socialise, sleep—in hotels, for instance—or avail themselves of transport services. But if you are going to codify, it will inevitably lead one into the complex task of compilation to produce a legally enforceable regime. Such an attempt will founder in confusion.
	Provision must be made for smoking areas dependent on the nature and extent of the user, in context with ventilation and smoke extraction—that is the only way one can deal with smoking areas—and the entitlement of the four-fifths of the population who do not smoke and the one-fifth who do. But, equally, both have to be protected from passive smoking.
	As to self-regulation, the Times of 2 January referred to the Secretary of State dealing with the voluntary regime of consultation that she is operating. The conclusion of the Government referred to in the newspaper that day was that self-regulation should always be the first preference.
	Finally, how on earth can your Lordships entertain any form of constructive debate on a skeleton Bill such as this without sight of the draft regulations? All we can do is consider the trigger clause in the Bill which—the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee is correct—confers legal efficacy on regulations made under absolute ministerial discretion, without guidelines or constraint, the contravention of which would constitute a criminal offence. It is a monstrous proposition such as I have never seen before. There would be no parliamentary scrutiny at Westminster; National Assembly procedures would apply.
	I feel that if this Bill is to be amended—it appears to be unamendable—consideration should be given to not criminalising smoking without even a request to desist being declined. This not only criminalises the smoker but also the person who runs the restaurant, the railway and so on. The Bill as it stands is wholly disproportionate and should not pass this House.

Baroness Gale: My Lords, I take this opportunity to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, for her kind remarks and for bringing this Bill forward. She will be aware that I have some reservations about it, which I have already spoken to her about.
	I believe that smoking in public places must be stopped. I believe that if the Government were prepared to implement such a ban, it would meet with the approval of the majority of people in this country. The benefits that would accrue from such a ban would be great: the health of the nation would be improved, especially that of children, who suffer as a result of passive smoking.
	I am pleased that when the Prime Minister launched the Big Conversation in Newport last November, he said that he hoped there would be a big conversation on smoking in public places. He posted the question: should local authorities have new powers to ban smoking at work and in public places? That is a question that we should all engage in, but I suggest that this important debate has gone on for a very long time. There is much evidence now to prove that smoking and passive smoking not only harm people's health but also kill.
	The Government have done much to encourage people to stop smoking. The number of people smoking has almost halved over the past 30 years, but 120,000 people in this country die each year as a result of smoking.
	Smoking is the primary preventable cause of class inequalities in healthy life expectancy. Smokers, on average, die 14 years earlier than non-smokers and often suffer from chronic ill health. Two thirds of smokers say that they want to give up. The Government have been active in this field, banning tobacco advertising and introducing free smoking cessation services. I wish they would now be bold and ban smoking in all public places in England and Wales.
	I am not 100 per cent happy with the Bill before us. First, I would have much preferred it to be a Bill banning smoking in all public places in Wales and England—something which those of us who have been campaigning on this issue for many years could have wholeheartedly supported—rather than enabling the Welsh Assembly to have such a ban if it wishes to do so.
	I am concerned about devolution issues here. I am not too happy about jumping the gun, as it were, with Westminster deciding which enabling legislation the Assembly should have without the Assembly requesting such a Bill. My understanding is that the Assembly did not include a wish to have a Bill in this Session. It has decided that other issues are of greater importance for this parliamentary Session.
	Devolution, if it means anything, means that the people of Wales will decide for themselves, through their elected Assembly Members, which matters are of the greatest importance to them. The elected Members of the Welsh Assembly have decided to legislate for other matters in this parliamentary Session, and we should respect their wishes. I have no doubt, in terms of what the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, was saying, that this matter has been debated in the Welsh Assembly and there is a genuine wish to have a ban in Wales. However, the Welsh Assembly has not requested that in this parliamentary Session. I believe devolution should be respected and we should allow the Assembly to come to Westminster and request the legislation that it wants, at its preferred time.
	Tourism and the economy of Wales need to be examined if a Wales-only Bill is implemented. For example, with regard to businesses near the border of England, I can envisage a situation similar to that which existed in Wales over drinking on Sundays. Some counties were dry and some were wet. Those who lived in the dry counties would slip over the border on Sundays to get a drink. A similar situation would not arise if the ban applied to England as well as Wales.
	Those are the two points about which I am really concerned. Apart from that, I wish the Government would take note of the Chief Medical Officer's report of 2002. In his report on passive smoking, he gives credit to the Government for the work that they have undertaken on smoking, but he was very concerned about the effect of passive smoking. He said:
	"Comprehensive workplace smoking bans could reduce the estimated prevalence of smoking to 23% from its present level of 27%".
	He also published a list of recommendations, including that:
	"Very serious consideration should be given to introducing a ban on smoking in public places soon",
	and that:
	"Parliamentary buildings should become smoke-free and dates should also be set to achieve this".
	If the Government could at least start by taking up this particular recommendation, it would give them a great opportunity to set a good example to the rest of the country, at the same time protecting the health of all those who use the parliamentary buildings.
	Would the Government also take note of the Royal College of Physicians? In a letter that I received from them recently, they said:
	"The Medical Royal Colleges and their Faculties believe the time has come for legislation to make public places smoke-free.
	As doctors we see the daily consequences of smoking and passive smoking in this country.
	Passive smoking causes an estimated 1,000 deaths in adults each year;
	And it increases the risk of cot death, asthma, and lung infection and middle ear diseases in children".
	The letter goes on to say:
	"We believe that everyone, smokers and non smokers alike have a right to freedom from tobacco smoke pollution. We also believe that employers have a duty to protect employees from harm.
	If all work places in Britain that currently permit smoking became smoke free over 300,000 smokers would stop smoking, and tens of thousands of lives would be saved".
	How much longer can the Government ignore such strong advice, which is backed up by so much evidence? Surely the case has been proven. The long-term benefits that would accrue from such a ban are obvious. I know the Government are keen on a voluntary ban; this works in some places, but it cannot be as effective as a total ban.
	I ask my noble friend the Minister to give us some hope today that the Government are thinking along these lines. Can he at least say that very serious consideration is being given to the recommendation of the Chief Medical Officer of banning smoking in all parliamentary buildings, if only as a start to a much wider ban? They cannot keep ignoring such strong medical evidence for much longer.
	Although I have reservations about the Bill, I am pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has given us the opportunity, once again, of debating this important matter, and I look forward to taking part as the Bill progresses through your Lordships' House.

Lord Monson: My Lords, the Bill raises issues of great importance. Therefore, the fact that the Government have seemingly crammed too many debates on to today's Order Paper—if I may say so, with all due respect, to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham—should not unduly curtail our discussion of it.
	I must declare a non-financial interest, as president of the Society for Individual Freedom and as a named supporter of the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco, otherwise known as FOREST. So my views on the Bill can be fairly easily guessed. But although I am a smoker, albeit a light smoker, I have no personal axe to grind as far as this Bill is concerned. Despite having more than a dash of Welsh blood, unfortunately I very rarely find myself in the Principality—it is not on my beat, so to speak. Indeed, I worked out yesterday, rather to my astonishment, that I have not set foot on Welsh soil since the summer of 1976. Perhaps I ought to visit those beautiful mountains and coasts quickly just in case this Bill becomes law.
	Of course, I am concerned to protect the liberties of all Her Majesty's subjects, wherever in the United Kingdom they may live. It is interesting to think that, if the referendum on Welsh devolution had taken place on the same day as the one for Scottish devolution—instead of three weeks later as the Government cunningly arranged—we would almost certainly not be having a debate on this Bill. In any case, we can all agree—smoker and non-smoker alike—that to find oneself in an unventilated, heavily smoke-infested area is disagreeable. There are ways and means of mitigating this, but I will return to those in a moment.
	The question for the purposes of this argument is whether such an atmosphere is not merely disagreeable, which we all agree on, but harmful as well. Despite what has been said, there is certainly empirical evidence to suggest otherwise. The financial pages of the Sunday Telegraph on 11 January, discussing the pensions crisis, revealed that the Government Actuary's Department has recently published figures showing that life expectancy for older people is growing even faster than had been expected, to the great alarm and distress of annuity providers. Life expectancy for a 65 year-old man is now 10.58 per cent higher than had been predicted only two years ago. The Sunday Telegraph went on to suggest that today's massive rises in longevity can be attributed to the lifestyles of those brought up in the 1930s and 1940s, which were much healthier than anything before or since—the words "or since" refer to the current unhealthy generation which is obese as a result of eating too much junk food and not taking enough exercise. We should reflect upon the words "healthier than anything before or since".
	One thing, above all, characterises those brought up in the 1930s and 1940s. We were passive smokers from the day we were born—indeed, in many cases, from well before we were born given that pregnant women were not then advised to stop smoking and very rarely did so. Most adults smoked in trains, buses, underground trains, cinemas, about 50 per cent of London theatres, taxis, private cars, shops large and small, lifts and telephone boxes. There were very few non-smoking compartments on trains because there was little demand for them. Only a few weirdos and fanatics in those days, such as Adolf Hitler, seriously wanted to ban smoking altogether.
	Unpleasant though most of us as children found it to be, if passive smoking had really been harmful, my generation would have died out long ago. Of course, some of our contemporaries who actively smoked really heavily paid the price, alas. Three or four of my dear friends and relations who smoked in the region of 60 cigarettes a day died of cancer, emphysema or heart disease in their sixties or in one case fifties. However, I do not know any moderate or light smoker who suffered in that way, let alone any non-smoker. Moreover, three or perhaps four times as many friends and relations who were non-smokers died of cancers entirely unrelated to smoking in their fifties or sixties. I am sure that I need not remind your Lordships of the splendid Madame Calment of Arles, who smoked two cigarettes a day until the age of 116 and finally died at the age of 121 just a few years ago.
	However, let us turn from empiricism to scientific scrutiny. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, in her interesting speech opening this debate said that harm from passive smoking was scientifically proven. I am afraid that not every scientist by any means agrees with her. In March 1998, after a study lasting seven years, the World Health Organisation conceded that the link between passive smoking and lung cancer was "not statistically significant". At worst, it might increase the risk of non-smokers getting lung cancer from one in 10,000 to one in 8,400.
	In July 1999, our Health and Safety Commission admitted that,
	"proving beyond reasonable doubt that passive smoking . . . was a risk to health is likely to be very difficult, given the state of the scientific evidence".
	In February 2001, Professor Sir Richard Doll, the first scientist in the world to suggest a possible correlation between primary smoking and lung cancer, declared:
	"The effect of other people smoking in my presence is so small it doesn't worry me".
	In April 2002, the Greater London Authority—not an instinctively libertarian body I would have thought—following an exhaustive six-month investigation, and having taken evidence largely from anti-smoking organisations and from a few pro-smoking ones, finally rejected the idea of any further restrictions on smoking declaring that it was not easy to prove a link between passive smoking and lung cancer.
	Finally, in May 2003, the British Medical Journal published the results of a Californian study involving no fewer than 118,000 adults over a period of no less than 39 years. About 30 per cent of them—36,500, I think—were non-smokers who were married to or lived with smokers, which is significant for the purposes of what we are discussing. The authors of the report found no significant link between secondhand tobacco smoke and either lung cancer or coronary heart disease. Asthma was not mentioned. However, I must say to the noble Viscount, Lord Simon, that by no means all asthmatics suffer as terribly as he obviously does—I entirely accept what he said. In fact, I know asthmatics who enjoy the occasional cigar or cigarette. Unconnected research in politically correct Sweden, by a toxicologist, endorses the findings of the California study.
	As I said earlier, it would be crazy to deny that heavy concentrations of first and second-hand tobacco smoke in a confined area is unpleasant. However, the law of supply and demand and the normal functioning of commercial competition ensures that, when an affordable remedy becomes available, it will be employed. Luckily, an affordable remedy is at long last available. Powerful smoke extractors-cum-air purifiers, made largely in Japan or Scandinavia, have now been installed—for example, at London Heathrow, London Gatwick and Congress House which, as many noble Lords on the Government Benches will know, is the London headquarters of the TUC. A TUC spokesperson has declared proudly:
	"This provides us with a smoke-free indoor solution for our workers".
	By all accounts, the installations have proved outstandingly effective. It goes without saying that a great many less well-funded businesses would install such devices if they could be certain that there would be no total ban on public smoking and that their quite heavy investment would not be wasted.
	As I have said before, there is another almost cost-free method of cutting down smoke. In the Indian sub-continent, Malaysia and other Asian countries, ashtrays are normally filled with a layer of sand or, more frequently and effectively, a quarter of an inch of water. That ensures that cigarette stubs are extinguished immediately instead of smouldering away for up to five minutes, emitting heavily tar-filled smoke. It also makes ashtrays much easier to clean the next morning. How sensible it would be if businesses and organisations in Britain emulated their eastern counterparts.
	Of course this is a well intentioned Bill. What the noble Baroness proposes is always extremely well intentioned. However, there is no conclusive evidence that a ban would seriously reduce fatalities or grave illnesses among non-smokers, and there are other much less illiberal means now available of mitigating the irritation caused by tobacco smoke in enclosed spaces.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I am pleased to join the others who have congratulated the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, on introducing this short Bill, which is becoming increasingly interesting as the debate continues. Her record in promoting the cause of public health in Wales is exemplary, and her wish to introduce the Bill is a further demonstration of her commitment to that cause. I thank her for the nice things that she said about me at the start of her speech.
	Like my noble friend Lady Gale, I should say at the outset that I would have preferred there to be a government Bill prohibiting smoking in public places anywhere in England and Wales. However, it is helpful to have the opportunity to take the debate forward today with this Bill, which I of course support.
	There is no need to rehearse the arguments for measures to reduce the incidence of smoking. The Department of Health tells us that smoking kills 120,000 a year in Britain. It is the single most important contributor to avoidable deaths and disease among adults. Those facts have been known since the 1950s, despite the efforts of the tobacco industry to cover up the research and deny the findings for many years.
	The new factor in the debate is the evidence of the damage done by environmental tobacco smoke, or passive smoking. The World Health Organisation's international agency research on cancer, to which the noble Lord, Lord Monson, referred, concluded that passive smoking causes lung cancer and increases the risk by between 20 per cent to 30 per cent. Prolonged exposure increases the risk of coronary heart disease by 25 per cent to 30 per cent. The heads of the 18 Royal Colleges and faculties, in their letter to the Times in November, estimated that 1,000 people a year died from second-hand tobacco smoke.
	I do not know how much more evidence one wants to demonstrate that passive smoking is dangerous and that it kills. The denials that it has that effect are rather similar to the denials from the tobacco industry in the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s, which said that there was no link between lung cancer and smoking.
	Opponents of measures to curb passive smoking often argue that people have a choice whether to expose themselves to other people's tobacco smoke and that, as they have that choice, new restrictions are unnecessary. Let us consider that argument for a moment. While I may have a choice whether to go into a smoke-filled pub, I would not have that choice if I had to work there. The evidence suggests that bar staff take in two to three times more tobacco smoke from passive smoking at work than they would if they lived with a partner who smoked.
	I would not have that freedom of choice if I were a child who was taken into a pub by an adult. Some noble Lords will remember that I attempted to move an amendment to the Licensing Bill that would have required pub landlords to ensure that the areas of their premises which that Bill was opening up to children would be smoke-free. The Royal College of Physicians has said that the total cost to the NHS of treating childhood illnesses caused by passive smoking is more than £400 million. Each year, 17,000 children under five are admitted to hospital in the United Kingdom with respiratory illnesses caused by exposure to tobacco smoke.
	My amendment to the Licensing Bill got nowhere because speakers from both Front Benches claimed that the so-called public places charter introduced by the hospitality industry was tackling the problem of passive smoking in bars and restaurants. Many of us are deeply sceptical about the effectiveness and commitment of the hospitality industry to increasing choice for its customers. The charter allows establishments to stick a notice on the door of the pub saying "smoking throughout", and then claim that that establishment is complying with the charter.
	The argument about ventilation to which the noble Lord, Lord Monson, referred, is answered by the Royal College of Physicians, which says that four years of self-regulation have achieved no change in smoking policy in about two-thirds of pubs and segregation and/or ventilation in the remainder are policies that are ineffective. It is not possible to remove all particles of harmful content from air by ventilation because 85 per cent of second-hand smoke is in the form of invisible odourless gases. Just because the atmosphere is not visibly smoky does not mean that the air is safe. Segregation of smoking and non-smoking areas may appear to reduce the problem but it does not stop tobacco smoke drifting in from the smoking to the non-smoking area.
	The noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, referred to the article in the Times on 2 January, and the comments made by the Secretary of state, Tessa Jowell. Yes, it is absolutely true that the Government's position is to try to rely on voluntary agreement. However, if he had gone on to read rather more of the article, he would have seen that the Secretary of State is reported as being about to summon bar and restaurant chain bosses for talks,
	"to try to reach a deal which would greatly expand the parts of bars and restaurants that are smoke-free and restrict smoking areas".
	I wish her well in those discussions.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, of course I have read the whole article; I have a copy of it. The Secretary of State is carrying on a voluntary discussion with restaurants and other people. Under extant law, inspectors can go round to do things, and she is seeing how that is going to work. That seems a reasonable approach.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for that intervention. Another way in which to interpret what the Secretary of State is doing is to say that she is giving those people one last chance, and that if they do not deliver something meaningful in the way of smoke-free accommodation in the hospitality industry, the Government will be obliged to bring in the sort of legislation that I and many on this side of the House would like to see. That is the sort of legislation that is increasingly being adopted in places such as Ireland, Finland, Norway, New York, California, Canada, Australia, Holland and many others. They are banning smoking from all public places, including bars and restaurants.
	It may come as a surprise to some noble Lords who oppose the Bill to hear that I have some sympathy with smokers, and with ex-smokers who apparently still like to inhale other people's tobacco fumes. The noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, was in her place earlier. She said in an intervention that she no longer smoked but that she liked breathing in other people's tobacco smoke. I believe that people should be given the freedom to live their lives as they wish, provided that the exercise of that freedom does not interfere with the comfort, security and health of others. It is in that area that I take issue with the Freedom Organisation and with the arguments expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Monson. It is the proviso that it does not interfere with others that is at the heart of the passive smoking debate.
	Smokers cannot be regarded as a persecuted minority, and certainly not in this House, where they are still successfully obstructing moves to make this a smoke-free workplace. As a result of that, our health and safety standards are now miles behind best practice among employers elsewhere in the country. Given the great care that we take to make our facilities as inclusive as possible for our colleagues with physical disabilities, I find it monstrous that my noble friend Lord Simon is denied access to most of the refreshment facilities in this place as a consequence of his acute asthmatic condition. I am also appalled at how our refreshment department staff, who will never complain, are subjected to the smoke of Peers who puff away a few feet away from them in the Bishops' Bar.
	Various solutions have been suggested for dealing with the problem of pollution caused by smoking. The Lancet, in a very radical approach, proposed that tobacco should become a banned substance. That is not very realistic, although I suspect that if tobacco were to arrive on our shores for the first time this year, given all that we know about the devastating damage that it inflicts on people's health, it would never get approval as a retail product.
	Another approach would be to restrict tobacco smoking to consenting adults in private. That is the way in which parts of the United States are developing.
	The third approach, which is the one that I favour, is to enforce genuine segregation of smokers from non-smokers. That would still allow a smoke-free environment to be the norm, certainly in all places of work and in public places as proposed in the Bill, but it would also allow establishments to provide an enclosed smoking area if they wished, of the sort that one increasingly finds at airports around the world.
	I can make just one small claim to helping the cause of public health in Wales—I shall conclude with this, if I may—and that is in my role as a non-executive, unpaid public-interest director of the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. I persuaded my colleagues on that board to adopt a smoke-free policy in all spectator areas. I was told by opponents that it would not work because people would ignore it; that stewards would be abused if they tried to enforce it; and that, even if the locals were prepared to refrain from smoking, foreigners such as the French and the Germans coming to support their countries' teams in the stadium would take no notice.
	None of that has happened. The smoking ban is to be strengthened, and it is enforced not by officious stewards, but by the peer pressure of non-smoking fans who do not want themselves or their children to breathe in other people's tobacco smoke. The campaign to draw the attention of the public to this policy will be intensified as the Six Nations tournament develops in the next few months.
	Rugby fans who attended any of the Rugby World Cup matches in Australia found that every stadium was entirely smoke-free and that a number of the matches were sponsored by tobacco cessation campaigns. That is where we must get to in Britain. That is where the noble Baroness wants us to go to in Wales, and I am happy to support her.

Lord Monson: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, he commended the Australian practice of banning smoking in stadiums, which are open spaces, not enclosed ones. In Finland, which he cited, there is no bar on smoking at a table outside a cafe or on the deck of a ferry. Presumably he wants to go further than Finland and ban smoking in exterior public spaces as well as interior ones. Is that correct?

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, my feeling is that if people are in proximity with others in an enclosed area, not necessarily with a roof or indoors, but in a sports stadium, those people are entitled to watch the event in an entirely smoke-free environment. That is what they did in Australia for the World Cup and that is what they do now in Cardiff at the Millennium Stadium.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords—

Lord Livsey of Talgarth: My Lords, I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, has finished his speech and that it is my turn to speak. If I may, I shall continue.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I am on my feet.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, has resumed his place. So we should move on to the next contribution, from the noble Lord, Lord Livsey.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords—

Lord Livsey of Talgarth: My Lords, I think that the advice has been given.
	I should like to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, not only on introducing the Bill but also, as the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, said, on the great work that she has done for health in Wales. I believe the Bill is thoroughly consistent with that work. I should also like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, for the work that he has done in relation to the Millennium Stadium, which I attend frequently. Given the recent exchange, I should point out that the Millennium Stadium rule applies whether the roof is closed or open. Both the fans and the stewards seem to live with that arrangement perfectly well.
	I am giving away my generation a little by saying that, in the latter half of the Second World War, we used to ask the American troops, "Have you got any gum, chum?" What we got in fact was not only gum but free American cigarettes. I can vouch for the fact that by the age of 10 I had smoked five different brands of American cigarettes. I discovered only recently that those were given free to the American troops to pass on to us so that another generation could smoke. Indeed, I smoked on and off, not very heavily at all, until the age of 18. However, when in further education I came across the son of a GP who consistently lit cigarettes from the butt and went on like that all day. I asked why he smoked so much and he said, "I have just done national service where we got a five-minute smoke break which everyone took". So when I was called up I resolved not to do it and have never smoked since. It is a habit and an addiction.
	I believe that the Bill enables the National Assembly for Wales, if it wishes, to introduce simple secondary legislation to prevent smoking in public places. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said, the power is equivalent to local authority by-laws. I do not see why the National Assembly cannot have the power to bring in such legislation in its own country.
	It follows that parts of Bills and particularly whole Bills—primary legislation, which I think addresses the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell—such as the one establishing the Children's Commissioner for Wales, a recent NHS Bill, parts of Education Bills and others on local government, have been considered by both Houses at Westminster. It is arguable whether those matters should be within the Assembly's province, but, as I said, they are not. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, made clear, this is not primary legislation.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, with respect—I know that the noble Lord does not intend to do this—that is not a representation; it is not comparing like with like. He is comparing a series of Bills. Those Bills are in a wholly distinct and different form from this skeleton Bill reported on by the Procedure Committee. It is no use trying to talk and confuse because we will get nowhere. There is a fundamental distinction, and the Government understand it.

Lord Livsey of Talgarth: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, makes an extremely helpful contribution. He made the same point as I was making. I was referring to primary legislation, whereas this Bill is entirely different: it refers to regulations and allows the National Assembly for Wales to make such regulations.
	The noble Baroness specified the offences in the Bill that will be dealt with only by magistrates' courts anyway. That addresses some of the concerns of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. The key point is that the Bill enables the National Assembly for Wales to introduce secondary legislation. Whether it wishes to do so is an open question although we have some indication of the views of the members of the National Assembly on this subject. Nevertheless I point out that the Richard Commission is sitting at the present time and is likely to report soon, certainly before the Bill completes its passage through Parliament. It will be interesting to see what the commission says about the matters that we are debating.
	Banning smoking in public places is the single most effective policy to prevent ill health. It reduces pressure on the NHS, reduces the costs of healthcare and discourages smoking. A public ban would tackle and reduce heart disease and cancer—the two biggest killers in Wales and, indeed, in the rest of the United Kingdom. However, we are talking about Wales in this context. Passive smoking, which poses a lethal health risk, would thus be avoided. I say just two words—"Roy Castle". We all know about his case and the effects that passive smoking had on his health which led to his eventual death. However, we shall ensure that provision is made for smokers.
	As a Liberal I recognise that freedom for people to smoke should be a right. However, a person's right to smoke must not impact on the health of others who constitute the majority—four-fifths—of the population who choose not to do so. In that respect controlling where people can smoke is absolutely crucial. Clearly, with 7,000 smoking-related deaths every year in Wales a massive preventive step forward would be made if smoking were banned in public places in Wales. I believe that the National Assembly for Wales must at least have the right—which is what this Bill enables—to make the decision whether or not it wishes to introduce the provision in Wales.

Lord Henley: My Lords, I start by offering an apology on behalf of my noble friend Lord Roberts of Conwy who is unfortunately detained in north Wales and is therefore unable to respond to this fascinating debate.
	Although ostensibly this Bill is about smoking, it is the constitutional implications that I wish to address and on which I wish to concentrate. All matters relating to smoking have been well covered already this afternoon. Speaking from the Opposition Front Bench, and this being a Private Member's Bill, I certainly have no intention whatever of opposing it. I speak personally on this occasion rather than as the Official Opposition Front-Bench spokesman. Speaking personally I have very strong doubts whether a Bill such as this—whether it was or was not requested by the National Assembly for Wales—should be introduced by means of a Private Member's Bill. Those doubts are based on a number of grounds.
	First, in the main, I suspect that it is desirable that when we delegate powers to the National Assembly for Wales, government Bills are quite simply more appropriate. I understand that the only such Bill the Government have supported so far is the Public Audit (Wales) Bill, which I understand has received a Second Reading in this House. I am advised that a number of other Welsh Bills may have been considered for inclusion in the Queen's Speech but this was not among them. Therefore, I presume that Her Majesty's Government have ruled it out as a candidate for the moment.
	Secondly, I understand that there is a commission in Wales under the very eminent chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, looking at the balance of powers between the Assembly and Westminster. That will report in due course to the Welsh Assembly. The Welsh Assembly will then, no doubt, feed it through to us. At that moment it might be right for a proper debate to take place on what powers should be further delegated to Wales, if that is considered appropriate. It would be better to wait for the report of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, rather than to pre-empt it.
	Thirdly, I believe it really is offering the opportunity to the National Assembly for Wales to bring in what are really very draconian powers—powers that need to receive very detailed scrutiny indeed, whatever our views on the merits of the Bill. That scrutiny will be very difficult to achieve if, as I think my noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway put it, the Bill is virtually impossible to amend.
	That brings me to my fourth point concerning the wideness of the powers that are being sought. To take just one example, the Bill seeks to allow the National Assembly for Wales to make provision to prohibit smoking in "a public place". "A public place" is left to be defined by the National Assembly for Wales. I expect that that is something which Parliament itself might want to consider. What, for example, is a public place? Where does it begin and end? Does it include the top of Snowdon, or what? Unamendable the Bill may be, but in Committee we might seek to explore just some of those issues.
	The same could be said of Clause 2(1), which deals with creating an offence. The noble Baroness said that she would seek to amend the Bill in Committee and limit the extent of what powers could be taken, in terms of what sort of offence and penalty could be created. If she is minded to do that, we should all assist her and further explore definitions of the offence and penalty. That may be a matter to consider in Committee.
	The third report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee was referred to by both my noble friend Lord Campbell and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, who wishes the committee to reconsider its advice. I suppose she would want it to do that, in that it took a fairly strong view, saying:
	"We take the view, therefore, that even many of the details of a ban are so significant that it is inappropriate to leave them all to subordinate legislation.
	In the light of this general conclusion, we believe that it is for the House as a whole to decide whether to agree to delegate powers, for Wales, to the National Assembly which the Committee would advise were not appropriate to be delegated, for England, to a Minister".
	We therefore have to consider the matter very carefully indeed.
	I agree emphatically with those sentiments expressed by the committee. There are major issues at stake relating to personal freedom. They are very important, and the committee made it clear that they would not be appropriate for delegation to a Minister in England. The Bill may not be a Henry VIII provision in the strict meaning of the phrase, but it certainly delegates much that I believe should properly be done here in Westminster.
	For those reasons, I hope that the noble Baroness will understand if I have to say that, although I have no intention of opposing the Second Reading, I do not think that it is either necessary or desirable that she pursues the Bill. I hope very much that she will withdraw it at some stage, and certainly that Her Majesty's Government will not give it any encouragement.
	That said, I must make it clear that, although I do not support the Bill, or for that matter any proposed ban on smoking in public places, I am not unsympathetic to what the noble Baroness desires to see; that is, a reduction in the incidence of smoking. My understanding is that we have seen a fairly considerable reduction in the number of smokers over the years. We have seen a growth in the number of smoke-free areas in restaurants and, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, said, they feel much cleaner and less smoky than they were. We have actually seen a growth in smoke-free areas in this House. I now find it quite extraordinary that, when I first came here, we all smoked in all parts of the Library as a matter of course. We now realise that that was rather an extraordinary state of affairs, and it is declining.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, my strictures were aimed primarily at pubs, where progress on implementing the Public Places Charter has been pathetic. Progress in this House has been slow but is consistent. However, there is a long way to go so far as the refreshment outlets are concerned, which is why I referred to my noble friend Lord Simon, who is effectively barred from large numbers of areas where the noble Lord and I will go quite cheerfully.

Lord Henley: My Lords, I feel sorry for the poor noble Viscount, Lord Simon, being effectively barred from many of those areas. However, as the noble Lord knows, quite a few areas of the Refreshment Department are now smoke-free, and the same is true outside in restaurants and other such places. I accept what he says about pubs—that progress might have been slower there—but I still believe that the policy pursued by this Government and previous governments of a gradualist approach involving persuasion and other methods is preferable.
	That approach has achieved very great results. In passing, I would be grateful if the Minister could give me some figures on the declining incidence of smoking over, say, the past 25 or 50 years. I believe that something like a quarter of the population now smoke, and I am sure that that figure would have been very much greater 25 years ago. I suspect that the figure will continue to decline, particularly if the Government continue to pursue that policy. I suspect that the resources that would have to be put into enforcing such a Bill would be far better directed to a continuation of the voluntary approach.
	It will therefore be clear that I am not, if I may put it in this way, a friend of the Bill, and hope very much that the noble Baroness pursues other means of reducing levels of smoking. Having said that, I have no intention of opposing its Second Reading and look forward with others to seeking further amendment to it in Committee.

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, let me begin by echoing the thanks of other noble Lords to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, for bringing forward the Bill. We have had an interesting debate with a large number of helpful views expressed. It is a short Bill, but one which touches on a number of important issues and I welcome the opportunity it has provided for us to debate some of those issues.
	The Long Title of the Bill, to:
	"Prohibit the smoking of tobacco by any person in Wales while in a public place",
	is actually misleading, as the Bill does not in fact do that. What it seeks to do is to provide the National Assembly for Wales with powers to prohibit smoking in public places, to define those places and to set the penalties for non-compliance.
	Those would be sweeping powers. The Bill will strike a chord with those who say about smoking in public, "there ought to be a law against it". It may also generate a wide public debate about the role of the Government and the Assembly. There will be those who think the Bill goes too far and those who feel it does not go far enough. We have heard those views this afternoon and there would be practical issues to be resolved, not least about enforcement of any such offences under the Bill and about the costs of implementation. The Bill provides a valuable opportunity for protagonists of all positions to contribute to the debate on such an important subject and I look forward with interest to following future debates.
	Earlier this week, the Scottish Executive announced plans to engage in a major public debate on smoking in public places, while one of the many issues that the Labour Party has raised in its Big Conversation initiative, as we heard from my noble friend Lady Gale, is whether local authorities should have new powers to introduce smoking bans at work and in public places. On the Government Benches we believe strongly that people should be protected from the harmful effects of other people's smoke. But we have taken the view that simply outlawing the practice of smoking in public places would not be an appropriate or an effective way to secure that protection. We have looked carefully at bans and legal restrictions introduced in other countries, but do not think that kind of action can be justified while it is possible to make substantial progress in other ways. We favour, and have promoted vigorously, action at a local level to both raise awareness of the dangers of second-hand smoke and encourage the adoption of voluntary practices to eliminate or reduce smoking. We have funded the UK's first ever TV campaign to raise public awareness of the risks to children of second-hand smoke and we have introduced new health warnings on cigarette packs to highlight the dangers of second-hand smoke.
	The measures taken by the Government and by industry partners are having an impact and I am sure noble Lords on all sides of the debate will acknowledge that. In particular, progress has been made in eliminating second-hand smoke risks in the workplace and on public transport. For example, the number of smoke-free workplaces has risen from 40 per cent in 1996 to 50 per cent today. The noble Lord, Lord Henley, asked for some figures. I have some here and would be happy to send them all to him, but I cannot read them all out today. However, I shall pick out some interesting statistics. In 1974, 45 per cent of the population smoked, but that fell to 27 per cent by 2001. More than 4 million people gave up smoking during those years, but there are still 11 million smokers in Britain, so we need to reduce that figure.
	Another area where further progress would be welcome is in the hospitality sector, which has been mentioned already. The Government have worked closely with the hospitality trade to develop a public places charter designed to provide customers with clear information on the type of smoking policy operating in a particular establishment. Given that, as was pointed out, over the past few years we have not made the progress that we would have wished, my right honourable friend Tessa Jowell is holding further discussions with the hospitality sector.
	In Wales—I remind noble Lords that the Bill is drafted so as to apply only to Wales—the Assembly has also been active. It has introduced initiatives to discourage young people from starting smoking and to encourage and support smoking cessation. It is promoting smoke-free public places and is engaged in a smoke-free community project that builds on work done by local authorities. In addition, it is taking action to raise awareness of the risks associated with second-hand smoke.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, reminded us that in January 2003 the National Assembly for Wales called on the Government to provide it with powers to ban smoking in public places in Wales. That proposal did not originate with the National Assembly Cabinet, which presents its proposals for primary legislation to the Assembly each year. It did not include a Bill to ban smoking in public places in Wales in its bids for the 4th Session, which the Assembly voted on in March last year. However, the Assembly Cabinet certainly passed on the Assembly's wishes to the Government and asked us to consider them. We reflected carefully on that request and concluded that the introduction and maintenance of smoking policies in relation to public and work places was a matter for local management, acting in response to the demands of staff and customers.
	This is an important subject and it is one that the Government take seriously. That is why we have adopted, and continue to strengthen and pursue, the policies that I outlined earlier.
	Returning to the Bill, I must say that I have reservations about its drafting. I believe that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and other noble Lords will acknowledge that further work is required before it can be regarded as technically sound. I mention, in particular, the Bill's untrammelled reference to "a public place"—a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Henley—which would face the Assembly, and possibly the courts, with a very difficult decision as to the scope of the powers conferred.
	I also ask the noble Baroness to reflect on whether it would be appropriate to grant the power to create a criminal offence only in Wales. I note also—a point referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and the noble Lords, Lord Campbell of Alloway and Lord Henley—that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee of your Lordships' House has observed that the House should consider whether to delegate to the National Assembly for Wales powers which it was advised were not appropriate to be delegated to a Minister for England. The noble Baroness may also feel that reflection is warranted on the penalties suggested and the practical problems of enforcement, particularly in border areas. There is also a question about the costs of enforcement.
	I do not wish, on behalf of the Government, to be overly critical of the noble Baroness's Bill. I consider it to be a valuable contribution to the public debate that we want to encourage on this important issue. Smoking is a subject that has aroused strong feelings at all levels in society over many centuries, often most strongly on the part of those who share the view of King James I, who famously defined smoking as:
	"A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless".
	In conclusion, I again pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, for bringing forward the Bill and to all noble Lords who have contributed to this afternoon's debate.

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff: My Lords, I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken today and I am particularly grateful to the Minister for his excellent quote at the end of his speech. I want to address the issues as they arose, because I believe that is the easiest way. I recognise the problem of time constraints for the staff of the House on a Friday.
	We have had some very interesting and wide-ranging contributions. I shall pick up on the health issues highlighted by several noble Lords. The noble Viscount, Lord Simon, spoke of being an asthma sufferer and we are extremely glad that he is still alive and with us to contribute to the debate. I do not believe that the health risk that he so clearly illustrated, and that he and many others in the country face on a daily basis, should be underestimated.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Gale, has made a plea for the Bill to extend across England and Wales. She is aware at first hand of the appalling morbidity and mortality that there is, particularly in the Welsh valley areas, due to those who smoke. During the war and in the years afterwards cigarettes were handed out. When I was a child it was fashionable for young women to smoke because people were blissfully unaware of the problems.
	The reasons that some of us have managed to live to our current ages despite being exposed to smoke, is that we have had better nutrition and better sanitation.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, on a point of clarification, would the noble Baroness agree with the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, and myself that there should be segregated areas and that the area segregated for non-smokers should be free of smoke and, within reason, the area segregated for smokers, like the punishment room in this House, should also be isolated.

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff: My Lords, I am most grateful for that early intervention from the noble Lord. I intend to touch on that later in my speech. Perhaps I may hold him in suspense for a little longer.
	I would love to see the Bill cover the whole of the UK, but I am a little concerned that Wales may wait for a very long time for the legislation, rather than being allowed to storm ahead of England, as the Assembly has already debated. All the evidence from a majority of people in Wales is that they want to do that. There will always be a minority who do not want any change of any kind in the interests of anyone other than themselves.
	I recognise, as the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, highlighted, that this was not requested in this Session of Parliament, but it was debated and I had some very helpful discussions with the Minister for Culture, Sport and the Welsh Language in Wales this week. There is a persistent wish to have this legislation. Not all of it needs to come into force in one go or at great speed. The powers that I have outlined in the Bill allow the Assembly to pace both the areas where they would implement the provisions and the timing. I shall return to that point.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Gale, highlighted the tourism issue, which concerns particularly those areas along the border. The Assembly would have the ability to phase in provisions, through negotiation with the industry, at a rate that was suitable. I do not believe that there is evidence that it would decimate the tourism industry, particularly in the Wrexham area.
	I turn to the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway. There is certainly dispute over the medical evidence in just about every single area one could think of. Data are subject to statistical analysis. However, there was an excellent analysis of all the papers in the New England Journal of Medicine; and there has been extensive debate in the medical press about the statistics for different studies and the size of the impact of confounding variables. The paper referred to in the BMJ may well have underestimated—because of confounding variables—the effect. That is why it did not reach statistical significance on analysis.
	However, there is a consistent trend in all the studies—even those that have not reached the P value of 95 per cent confidence interval. Primary smokers decline when one decreases the ability for the occurrence of passive smoking. It has been estimated that in Finland there has been a 10 per cent fall overall. So I would dispute the impact of a ban on smoking.
	Responsibility for and enforcement of a ban would lie at local level. We already delegate responsibility for the licensing of premises. We certainly prosecute people who sell liquor on unlicensed premises and those who sell liquor to under-age people. Such decisions are taken at a local level. I ask only that the Assembly be allowed to take such decisions for Wales.
	I dispute that the provision is draconian in its outlook. The Assembly has the power to determine regulations for children in foster care. I suggest to the noble Lord that that has an enormous impact on the children; and that the results of fostering have such an enormous impact on society—whether it goes well or badly—that the existing powers of the Assembly have a much greater impact— generally adverse—than any powers it might be able to exercise under the Bill. Voluntary measures have certainly failed.
	The tobacco industry's income fortunately is falling. That was highlighted in the excellent report by the Chief Medical Officer, referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Gale. There is very powerful evidence in the chapter on passive smoking; indeed, the report's endorsement is lead by the president of the Royal College of Physicians.
	In general, before legislation is passed by Parliament at Westminster, I would question whether this House always has sight of regulations that will be made as a result. The Assembly has responsibility for public health. It is only within that remit that my Bill proposes that it should have its powers. The question of providing a criminal penalty I suggest is no greater because of the differences in one's ability to determine—for example—licensing over the sale of alcohol in different premises.
	I would love to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Monson, to Wales on a visit that is long overdue. We have a wonderful country. I appreciate his confidence in my intention on bringing the Bill. Perhaps I may reassure him that I am happy for him to smoke wherever he wants to, providing he does not make non-smokers share his downstream and exhaled toxins. Even if he comes to Wales, even if my Bill passes and even if the Assembly implements bans, I would let him smoke outside my back door. He would be most welcome and I should entertain him to dinner.
	As for freedoms, the Assembly is the elected democratic body. As a person living and working in Wales, I have spoken to many people from all walks of life. Smokers and non-smokers alike want the Assembly to have the powers to make a difference. Sadly, the voluntary measures that the Government have tried so hard to implement have not worked. The unions have told their porter and security members on hospital premises that they should not tackle people smoking in designated no-smoking areas and even underneath no smoking signs because those who have tackled smokers have felt threatened. They have felt physically threatened and certainly have been verbally threatened.
	The noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, has been extremely generous in his comments. I appreciate them enormously. On behalf of everyone in Wales, I also greatly appreciate what he has done to make the Millennium Stadium such a delightful place to go to—delightful because people do not smoke under one's nose and children can be taken there safely.
	I would just ask those noble Lords who oppose the Bill and who question the evidence whether we are really to wait 40 years to discover whether 10 year-olds who are at present subject to passive smoking are still alive to convince some that what is their pleasure may be someone else's death sentence.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, perhaps I may politely tell the noble Baroness that what we usually do, and have done for more than 20 years, in a situation such as this, especially when we are asked by the Government Front Bench, is to thank noble Lords for what they have said—even the ones with whom we do not agree—and sit down. This is not the time to start another argument. The noble Baroness has the whole Bill ahead of her; we have a lot of Bills ahead of us; other Members of the House are waiting in the Corridor on a Friday—before going off to hunt if they can get there.

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff: My Lords, in reply to the noble Lord's intervention, I ask him whether there is any proposal to push the Question to a vote. If not, and if I may negotiate with the Government Front Bench and discuss matters, as the Minister so helpfully described, to ensure that my Bill is put in a better form—I appreciate the help that I have been given both by the Government in this House and by Members of another place—I will certainly not reiterate and answer some of the points that have been made. I am grateful to receive that reassurance from the House.
	On Question, Bill read a second time, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Air Traffic Emissions Reduction Bill [HL]

Lord Beaumont of Whitley: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. The Bill proposes a reduction in emissions of CO, NOx and greenhouse gases due to air traffic. As well as reducing pollution around airports and in the upper atmosphere, the intended effect is to reduce the amount of air traffic and thus eliminate the demand for new runways to be built.
	The Government have predicted that demand for air travel will treble during the next 30 years and, in the White Paper on aviation published in December, proposed that new runways be built at Stansted, Heathrow, Birmingham and other airports to meet that demand. At the core of my Bill is that that is an old-fashioned "predict and provide" policy. Predict and provide was abandoned for roads policy after the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment reported that more roads would simply attract more traffic, not end congestion. Predict and provide is not a sound policy for many things; it is certainly not for air transport.
	The Green Party is not alone in that view. In its 18th report on transport and the environment, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution stated:
	"an unquestioning attitude toward future growth in air travel, and an acceptance that the projected demand for additional facilities must be met, are incompatible with the aims of sustainable development".
	Aviation is the most highly polluting transport mode on earth and its pollution constitutes a major hidden cost to the economy. Aviation is also subsidised directly and indirectly by the taxpayer and is a major drain on the UK balance of payments.
	The most important but least obvious impact of aircraft is a contribution to climate change. When burnt, aircraft fuel is converted to carbon dioxide and water. The global warming effects of carbon dioxide are well recognised, and much attention is now being paid to the issue. However, carbon dioxide emitted by aircraft on international flights is excluded from the national targets for the Kyoto agreement.
	We know that flying is causing us real problems with greenhouse gases and climate change in a way that is exacerbated by the total global warming effect of aircraft emissions high above the earth's surface. So far, aviation has led a charmed life and escaped its responsibilities in the debate about greenhouse gas reduction. The matter is serious: we will pay for our cheap flights with devastating effects all over the globe. Incidentally, it will also result in the death of the insurance industry, as there will be no possibility of insuring against the damage being done. The cost of UK aviation's contribution to climate change is estimated at well over £2 billion a year. By 2050, aviation could be contributing up to 15 per cent of overall global warming effects produced by human activities, with staggering economic and environmental costs.
	Aircraft emit large quantities of air pollution on their landing and take-off cycles. The most important pollutants are nitrogen oxides. At Heathrow, aircraft are the major contributor to NOx pollution, but around smaller airports, other sources, especially road traffic, contribute more. Small particulate matter is less of a problem from aircraft; the majority of such pollution around airports comes from road traffic and fixed sources such as power plant. The health costs of air pollution from the UK aviation sector are estimated at more than £1.3 billion a year.
	The impact that most concerns people who live near airports is noise. The way in which the Government measure noise—loudness equivalent (Leq)—enables the industry and government to claim that noise levels are not increasing, when public perception is often the reverse. The economic costs of aircraft noise in the UK are estimated at £330 million a year. I had considerable experience of such noise when I lived in Kew, right under a flight path. If there was any value or virtue in the sermons that I preached on Sunday mornings in the two churches in Kew the effect was lessened by the necessity to stop at times because it was impossible to talk from the pulpit over the aircraft noise. One had to pause for 30 seconds or more before proceeding. Such interruptions are a great irritation, not because I pretend that people would have been better off for being able to hear every word that I spoke without interruption, but it is merely symbolic of the amount of noise that local people have to put up with.
	Night flights are a particular problem for those living beneath flight paths. At night, Leq is of little significance; it is individual aircraft that are most important—whether they are loud enough to wake people up. However, the number of flights is still important. Most people can get back to sleep after being woken by one plane but are kept awake by a succession. Any measure that reduces the number of flights will reduce the need for night flights and so help to ensure that people can get a decent night's sleep.
	The construction of new runways is enormously damaging. Large swathes of countryside, often including whole villages, are required, and many people's homes have to be demolished. Many more are affected by yet more noise pollution and road congestion. The proposed new runways at Stansted, Heathrow and elsewhere would devastate the local communities in their vicinity. Professor John Whitelegg in the Green Party's Aviation's Economic Downside report—I am most grateful to him, and to Alan Francis for the material that they have given me to introduce this Bill—stated that,
	"The overall hidden economic costs of the European Union's aviation sector are currently estimated at £14.3 billion a year—of which the UK alone accounts for £3.782 billion, or 26 per cent. This does not include the cost of aviation accidents and accident services".
	Aviation is undertaxed compared with most other sectors of the economy. Flight tickets, aircraft and aviation fuel are zero-rated for VAT, which costs HM Treasury £1.8 million a year in lost VAT alone. Aviation fuel pays no tax at all. If aviation fuel were taxed at the same rate as unleaded petrol, this would raise £5 million a year. No tax is paid on duty-free sales. Effectively, society is subsidising the aviation industry, through a colossal tax break of £9.2 million a year. All of these costs and subsidies are increasing rapidly as the aviation sector grows. Government policy continues to support such growth, regardless of the consequences. If remedial action is not taken, UK air passenger numbers are forecast to increase from 130 million in 1995 to 400 million in 2020; the equivalent of an extra four airports the size of Heathrow, or 12 new airports the size of Manchester.
	The application of a fairer tax regime on aviation could cut UK passenger numbers to 59 per cent of the figure forecast for 2020, and no new runways would be required. The aviation industry claims that flying is good for the economy, but it likes to ignore the fact that tourists coming into Britain by plane spend a lot less than tourists from Britain spend abroad. Assessed in this way, flying is a drain on the national economy; it makes a loss.
	The aviation industry is greedy and has a lot of influence. It makes donations to all three of the big parties; regrettably not to the Green Party. BAA is the ninth largest donor to Labour; the seventh largest donor to the Conservatives; and the fourth largest donor to the Liberal Democrats. Former Aviation Minister Chris Mullin was quoted in a recent New Statesman special supplement on aviation. He said:
	"I learnt two things. First, that the demands of the aviation industry are insatiable. Second, that successive governments have usually given way to them. Although nowadays the industry pays lip-service to the notion of sustainability, its demands are essentially unchanged. It wants more of everything—airports, runways, terminals".
	I have in my brief a large section on the aviation White Paper, which your Lordships will be relieve to hear I am not going to recite. I wish just to pick out one or two things. To address the problem of aircraft noise disrupting lessons in schools near airports, the White Paper suggests in paragraph 3.23 that funding should be provided for school trips away from the noisy environment, especially where the loss of amenity from outdoors may be severe. This is an admission that it is impossible for communities to live their lives normally near to airports.
	Again, I would like to pick out the point about the "polluter pays" principle. My party agrees with the "polluter pays" principle, and agrees that it should apply to the aviation industry. However the Government appear to want to leave it to the industry and international bodies to sort out. This is clearly a government responsibility, and is one that the Government are trying to duck. Our Bill would ensure that the Government address the issue.
	The Government state that they want to reduce the environmental impact of air travel—I am sure that the Minister will reinforce that—but they seem to have no mechanism of any kind to achieve that. I hope that the Minister will say if he thinks that I am wrong on this matter and tell me what mechanism they do have. Our Bill provides the mechanism that they need and that they say they want. The Air Traffic Emissions Reduction Bill is just a first step towards getting the aviation industry under control. It would reduce pollution from air traffic and remove the need for new runways.
	I now turn to an explanation of the Bill as it stands. Clause 1 specifies that the Secretary of State shall,
	"draw up within two years of the coming into force of this Act an integrated air transport plan . . . which will show—
	(a) what measures are in his opinion necessary in order to achieve [reductions in] air traffic emissions".
	Those figures would represent a reduction in air traffic emissions of an average of 1 per cent per annum. That reduction is required in order to reduce pollution and climate change effects. Although international air transport is not counted for the purposes of the Kyoto agreement, if the overall reduction in CO 2 emissions required by the Kyoto agreement is being met, air transport should be treated in a similar manner to other sources of emissions.
	The Bill also imposes a duty on the Secretary of State to state the level of investment in airport facilities that he believes to be desirable. The Government should decide how much runway capacity is required. It should not be left to the airport operators and airlines to decide that. Similarly, the Secretary of State, through agencies such as the Strategic Rail Authority, should decide what level of enhanced capacity and speed is required on the railways to provide an alternative mode of travel for short and medium distance travellers.
	A recently opened high-speed rail line between Frankfurt and Cologne has replaced short-haul flights between those two cities. Many other European countries, including Germany, France, Belgium and Spain have developed high-speed rail services that have wholly or partially replaced short-haul air services. Now that we have started the Eurostar rail service, there is no reason why we should not do the same.
	Clause 1(2) provides that in preparing the national plan,
	"the Secretary of State shall have regard to—
	(a) the impact of air traffic on communities;
	(b) the transport needs of people;
	(c) the impact of air traffic on the environment"
	and "any representations made" by consultees.
	Clause 1(3) specifies that the Secretary of State shall consult organisations representing local authorities, the interests of business, the interests of air users and the protection of the environment. Clause 1(4) states that the Secretary of State shall present the national plan to both Houses of Parliament. Clause 1(5) states that the Secretary of State may take action himself and assist actions by principal councils. Clause 1(6) states that the Secretary of State shall report annually to Parliament. Clause 1(7) states that,
	"once every three years the Secretary of State shall conduct a full review of the [national] plan and present the results of this review to both Houses of Parliament".
	Clause 1(8) states that the Secretary of State, after considering any debates in the two Houses of Parliament, may amend as he sees fit the national plan.
	Clause 2 gives the meaning of terms used in the Bill:
	"'air traffic' means all civilian flights into, out of and within the United Kingdom".
	Military air flights are excluded because the Bill is concerned with passenger flights. Clause 2 continues:
	"'air traffic emissions' is the sum of air traffic emissions of carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and greenhouse gases from air traffic—
	(a) on flights between UK airports,
	(b) on flights within UK airspace, and
	(c) at UK airports".
	The definition of emissions includes all the emissions from airplanes within the UK airspace and on the ground in the UK. It also includes emissions from other activities associated with the operation of the airport, including car and lorry trips to the airport. A considerable amount of pollution around airports comes from these associated activities.
	While it would be possible to measure the pollution from the airplanes and vehicles, there are now standard data books from which it can be calculated. That is how it is done at Zurich Airport where emissions limits have been applied. It should be noted that it gives flexibility to how the emissions reduction targets are met. For instance, if fewer people travelled to the airport by car, and more travelled by public transport, emissions would be reduced. If solar power is used to generate electricity for the airport buildings, again, emissions would be reduced.
	Clause 3 is a financial provision, while Clause 4 covers the citation and extent of the Bill.
	I hope that noble Lords will agree to give the Bill a Second Reading. I do not pretend that it is perfect as it is—what Bill produced in this House ever is, even those from the Government Front Bench? However, it would be good if we were given the opportunity to amend the Bill and produce it in a form ready for a future government or future Members of Parliament in the House of Commons. I am quite convinced that "predict and provide" will not do and that something like this legislation will have to be introduced in the near future. So I ask noble Lords to give it a start by agreeing to its Second Reading. I commend the Bill to the House.
	Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Lord Beaumont of Whitley.)

Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde: My Lords, until recently I was chairman of the Freedom to Fly Coalition, an organisation comprising representatives from the airlines, the tourist industry, the CBI, the TUC and, indeed, all the unions bar one from both the aviation and rail transport sectors. However, the coalition no longer exists following the White Paper.
	Like most people in Britain and irrespective of their position as regards aviation, I am concerned about emissions and certainly want to see the level of those emissions kept as low as possible. However, I do not believe that this Bill is the right or practical way to achieve that, and it is full of misleading assumptions. None the less, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, on his candour in presenting the Bill. He said that it would provide a means of eliminating the need to build extra runway capacity and went on to say that it would be a first step towards bringing the aviation industry under control, as though it is something that is bad for Britain. However, it is not. The industry has been very good for Britain.
	We have been good at developing our aviation sector since the first commercial Comet flight just over 50 years ago. The wonderful aeronautical engineer, the late Professor Arthur Lefebvre, developed technologies that have considerably reduced jet engine emissions. We have also seen promising developments at Rolls-Royce.
	The Bill would cut passenger numbers, increase prices, reduce choice and affect severely the British economy—to the betterment of our European competitors who are building considerably increased aviation capacity. Germany and France were mentioned in the context of railways, but both of those countries are expanding their aviation capacity at a far faster rate than us. Since World War Two we have built one new runway, in Manchester. So I do not think that this Bill provides the answer.
	We have to deal with emissions in a practical way that will assist us in our aim; that is, to be as environmentally friendly as possible while doing no damage to the United Kingdom economy. After all, we are an island nation and we depend on aviation for much of our business. In value, one-third of all our exports are transported by air.
	The Government White Paper published last December sets out what the industry believes is the right way forward. On page 40 it states that:
	"The Government is committed to a comprehensive approach, using economic instruments to ensure that growing industries are catered for within a reducing total".
	Aviation is a growing industry and therefore, as it grows, the issue of emissions will also loom larger.
	The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated that as demand grows, aviation's contribution to climate change will do so as well. Currently its contribution is 3.5 per cent of the total and could grow to 6 per cent. If aviation continues to grow at its present rate, and in the absence of any technological or other developments, the contribution could rise to 14 per cent by 2050. It is our responsibility to make sure that we all work together. I repeat, the Bill is not the way to do it.
	Aviation currently accounts for 0.5 per cent of total emissions in the UK, as opposed to 21 per cent for road transport and 26 per cent for power stations. Indeed, aviation fuel has increased the efficiency of jet planes by something like 50 per cent over the past 30 years.
	It is against that background that the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, a member of the Green Party, quite straightforwardly referred to a number of issues, including taxation on aviation fuel. He also referred to the "back end" of the Bill and the emissions of flights over the UK. Is he seriously saying that we can control flight paths? This is about bringing emissions down against an increasing market; does he really want all international planes to go around the United Kingdom? That is not within our control totally.
	Taxation on fuel, as the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, and his party know full well, is subject to the Chicago Convention, which is an international agreement, for obvious reasons. If we tax aviation fuel in the UK, we will have aircraft overflying Britain for fuel in Europe. Yet again, that would affect our economy.
	There is no VAT on any ticket on any kind of transport in the United Kingdom. If we were to treat aviation in the same way as other modes of transport that would be different, but the noble Lord is asking for aviation to be treated differently and for VAT to be applied to its tickets.
	It is often claimed that the industry is subsidised. This is supported by a great many statistics, but I am not sure where they all come from. Volterra Consulting carried out an independent review of the three industries—aviation, rail and road. By "road" I mean buses; public transport. It concluded that rail receives a subsidy of £1.6 billion a year, equivalent to £1.69 per passenger. I am sure that no one in Britain objects to that in the interests of social cohesion, and rail is a good form of transport. Buses receive £650 million, or £15 per passenger. Aviation was a net contributor of £750 million, or £4.15 per passenger. So I would challenge the claim that aviation is directly subsidised by the taxpayer through the Government.
	The White Paper made clear that aviation should pay its external costs. Yes, it should. We believe that it does. I am sorry that the noble Lord did not mention emissions trading, because not only the industry but many non-governmental organisations support emissions trading as a way forward to ensuring that aviation contributes to climate stabilisation. We congratulate the Government on stating in the White Paper that they will use the UK presidency in 2005 to put the issue of emissions trading as a priority on the agenda. That must be one of the ways forward. It will be good to see it introduced for intra-European Union flights from 2008. It will be a big step forward if we can get it. In Britain, the aviation industry supports it.
	The air passenger duty that we all pay, which brings in £750 million a year, is a blunt instrument. It needs reviewing. Certainly the Government have said that they will press for other emission reduction actions. We have to accept that. I shall refer to one or two of those in a moment.
	The main impact of Clause 1(c) would be to substitute rail transport for aviation in the UK. That would be impractical. That is not only my statement; a Strategic Rail Authority study has shown that the vast majority of journeys in the English regions to London and the south-east are by car or rail. Air travel accounts for less than 3 per cent of journeys. So if we were to say "No more aviation" it would not solve the problem to which the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, referred. Even with investment in the rail infrastructure, the Strategic Rail Authority study shows that fewer than 1 million passengers might switch.
	The Commission for Integrated Transport is inconclusive in its study on whether substituting rail for air would bring net environmental benefits.
	The noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, referred to high-speed rail lines. I wait with glee for the time when the submissions for a new high-speed line from the south-east to the north-west are put forward, as has been suggested by the Regional Development Agency in the north-west, to see if the Green Party objects to any planning permission for the land that will have to be taken out, which is far more than would be used for several new airports, when those bids are put in. The noble Lord might like to answer that when he responds.
	Clause 2 calls for the Secretary of State to have regard to the impact of air traffic on communities and the environment—the "transport needs of people". What about the economy, which is one of the core factors in the sustainable requirements that the Government have put forward? The economy is mentioned nowhere in the Bill, yet in Britain the jobs of 180,000 people depend on the industry and another 540,000 depend on it indirectly. If you look at development in the future, it is one of the creation areas of good jobs against a background of the decline of our steel, shipbuilding and coalmining industries. This is one of the new industries. Do we want to kill it at birth?
	The best way forward is to see what we can do practically to contain the emissions as much as we can. Technology has to be a factor. The Greener by Design group, which is funded by the DTI, offered the possibility of new design and construction giving, over the coming decades, a reduction in fuel burn of between a quarter and a third. Rolls-Royce reduced the NOx emissions from its latest engines to achieve up to 30 per cent lower than the current NOx regulation standard.
	There is continuing design development to target further reductions of up to 50 per cent by 2010. The Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe, which includes the member states as well as technical organisations, targets NOx reductions of 80 per cent and 50 per cent improvement in fuel efficiency by 2020. This has to be the way forward—not putting a cap on industry and cutting back flights.
	Improvements in air traffic control efficiency could result in reductions of between 6 and 10 per cent. Australia has done it and has delivered something like a 12 per cent reduction.
	UK airlines could take the lead in introducing "clean flying" techniques. Do not ask me, I am not a pilot, but apparently the way they take off and land can have a beneficial or detrimental impact on emissions. We could also incorporate the EU emissions trading scheme, hopefully from 2008.
	These are the ways, I suggest, of having an aviation industry that is good for our economy. It is good for Britain—we will need it in the future. With a global industry in a global environment, we must do what we can to ensure that the emissions are contained as much as possible. The way to do that is through technology and other methods, not by the Bill.

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: My Lords, being very far from an expert on the issues raised by the Bill, I rise to speak with some humility. I intend to make a very brief contribution, because I have only a couple of very short points to make.
	I congratulate my noble friend Lady Dean on her extraordinarily persuasive speech in which she set out of the arguments for the aviation industry. I am sure that most of us would find it difficult to gainsay a lot of what she said. However, does she consider that the short or medium-term economic benefits that the aviation industry undoubtedly produces in this country and elsewhere might not reasonably be seen in the context of the longer-term economic and other kind of disbenefit which we are increasingly aware that the growth in aviation the world over is bringing not only to this country but to every country?
	That said, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, on introducing the Bill and giving the House an opportunity to debate a matter of very grave concern both in the here and now and in the future. The Bill seeks to provide for an integrated air transport plan. Lying behind any such plan must be some assumptions about the likely future growth of air traffic. The noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, has ranged very widely over the issues that lie behind his wish to introduce this Bill and he touched on the question of assumptions about the growth in air traffic. The Government have already set out their assumptions on the matter. They are concisely expressed by my honourable friend Kim Howells in the current edition of the House magazine. He says that,
	"there has been a five-fold increase in air travel since the 1970s and half the population now flies at least once a year. Given demand could be two and a half times the current level by 2030, we needed a framework for the future of air transport in the UK over the next 30 years".
	I do not suppose that anybody in this House or elsewhere would deny that we need a framework for air transport. However, we might take note of the careful word "could" in that quotation—
	"demand could be two and a half times the current level by 2030".
	That projected growth in demand is the major assumption on which the alleged need for airport expansion is based, with its consequent environmental impact including growth in emissions.
	The news in recent weeks has been dominated by the issue of airports and airport security. We hear repeatedly that the terrorist organisation that we have learnt to fear the most, Al'Qaeda, is—and I quote from numerous news reports—"obsessed" with the use of passenger aircraft as, in effect, weapons of mass destruction. Travel to and from the USA has been made more difficult by a big increase in security checks and procedures. Already, airlines are deploying all kinds of incentives to encourage passengers to fly in these new and frightening circumstances.
	Last week, we learnt that the Church of England is experiencing significant financial difficulties partly because its normally reliable population of North American visitors to our great churches has declined very markedly. These are straws in the wind and, as yet, few in number, but do we imagine that the terrorist threat to air traffic, with its consequent costs—both financial and emotional—will disappear any time soon? If not, we should at least consider the possibility that, over time, demand for non-essential air travel may not grow at anything like the rate predicted and provided for in the Government's latest plans. I see no evidence—perhaps I have not been looking in the right places—of any read-across between increased levels of anxiety about air travel generated by security issues and the buoyant assertion of exponential growth in demand which underpins those plans.
	I have one other observation. On Monday, the Guardian ran an article under the headline, "Freak summers will become a regular event", recording the findings of a report in Nature online using models which predict the impact of global warming on the world's climate. That is an issue to which the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, has already referred extensively. This is a very serious matter of course raising the threat of the extinction of thousands of species and a dramatic redefinition of how life might have to be lived on this remarkable planet in the future. I do not wish to be frivolous on such a weighty subject, but I would like the Government to consider the following: the enormous recent growth in air travel has been largely fuelled by the advent of low-cost airlines. One wonders whether the economics of those businesses are truly sustainable in the long term. Much, although not all, of this traffic is for leisure purposes; people escaping to the sun. How much longer will they need to do so? How much better it would be for the UK tourist industry if they did not.
	One way of meeting our emissions target is by not giving in to the assumption that air traffic must grow to the extent that the Government and the air industries would like us to believe is inevitable. Let us not ruin our health and our heritage by passively succumbing to that assumption. I wish the noble Lord well with this Bill and look forward to the debate to which it will give rise.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, this is not the first time that I have had the pleasure of speaking on a Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley. As on those previous occasions, today I am happy to offer my broad support for what he is seeking to achieve. As other noble Lords have said, this is the first occasion that we have had the opportunity to debate some of the issues arising from the Government's recent White Paper, The Future of Air Transport.
	The Air Traffic Emissions Reduction Bill has an underlying philosophy, which the noble Lord described well—namely, that current and future growth rates of air transport are unsustainable because of their wide-ranging environmental impacts, and in particular climate change. That is a view I share, and it is a view reinforced by respected bodies such as the Government's own advisory group, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. The Royal Commission's chairman, Sir Tom Blundell, criticised the White Paper, saying on the 16 December 2003:
	"The White Paper fails to take account of the serious impacts that the projected increase in air travel will have on the environment. Earlier this year the government published an Energy White Paper setting out its strategy for tackling global climate change, and set challenging but necessary targets for greenhouse gas emissions. Today's Aviation White Paper undermines those targets and continues to favour commerce over vital carbon dioxide reduction measures".
	Another expert commenting on the White Paper was the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, the Chief Executive of the Environment Agency. She pointed out that the predicted growth in aircraft emissions acknowledged in the White Paper would be inconsistent with the UK's climate change reduction targets. She said:
	"The Government has committed to a 60 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. Today's White Paper does not alter that target but its acceptance of growth in air traffic, without a full understanding of the industry's contribution to climate change, jeopardises its achievement. The Government's own forecasts suggest that by 2030 aircraft fuelled at UK airports could have a global warming impact equivalent to at least 30 per cent of current CO2 emissions from all UK domestic sources. This is a massive growth from its 5 per cent share in 2000".
	It is clear that there are valid, expert concerns that the Government's White Paper has not got it right when it comes to controlling and reducing aviation's huge, important and worrying contribution to climate change. Getting air transport's greenhouse gas emission under control needs, as the Bill before us points out, a complex mix of assessment and policy measures. My own view is that the five recommendations made by the Royal Commission in Sir Tom Blundell's pre-Christmas statement should be integrated into the noble Lord's Bill during Committee stage. Perhaps he will consider that suggestion.
	The recommendations are, first, to impose climate protection charges for aircraft taking off and landing within the EU; secondly, to restrict airport development to encourage greater competition for available take-off and landing slots in order to optimise their use; thirdly, to develop major airports into land-air hubs integrated with an enhanced rail network; fourthly, to support technological development to lessen the damage done by air travel; and, fifthly, to include international aviation in the emissions trading scheme under the Kyoto protocol.
	Central to the issue of airport provision is the question of managing demand. I know that my noble friend Lady Dean takes a totally different view on these matters from the view that I take. Yes, that will mean higher fares and fewer flights. That is something that the Government will have to face up to, because the alternatives, as described by the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, and by my noble friend Lady McIntosh, are impossible to contemplate.
	I commend to your Lordships the research carried out by the former Treasury economist, Brendon Sewill, and published by the Aviation Environment Federation. He points out that the UK aviation industry receives a tax-free subsidy of £9 billion a year through tax-free fuel and VAT-free transactions. He concludes that if aviation fuel were taxed at the same rate as petrol for cars and the VAT exemption were removed, demand for air travel would be reduced to the point where there would be no need for any new runways in the UK over the next 30 years, because there would be sufficient capacity at existing airports.
	As the consultation paper issued in December 2000 by the Government stated:
	"The Government believes that the tax exemption on aviation fuel is an anomaly. Introducing such a tax would help to place environmental costs on the polluter".
	The Royal Commission has stated that in terms of climate change:
	"Travelling by air is broadly equivalent to one or two people travelling [the same distance] in a passenger car".
	It therefore follows that there is a justification for imposing duty on aviation fuel at a rate that is at least as high as that for petrol, which is 45.8p per litre. The Treasury has stated that with duty at that rate it would raise £5.7 billion a year.
	As regards VAT, virtually all countries except the United Kingdom charge VAT on internal domestic flights. It is perfectly true that we do not charge VAT on public passenger transport, but we do charge it on taxis and car hire. Aviation has to be singled out as a special case because of the need to cope with the problem of climate change and the need to curb the growth of demand. In October 2002, for example, the German Government announced a programme that included the policy that flights from Germany to other EU nations should no longer be exempt from VAT. We should look at doing the same. The benefit from imposing VAT on all flights from UK airports would be around £4 billion a year. It is quite clear that tackling these tax concessions provides a way of controlling and managing demand. There is nothing inevitable about its inexorable rise, if you are prepared to do something about it.
	The other complementary approach, to which the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, referred, is to encourage people to transfer from short-haul flights to rail. Again, the figures suggest that this could substantially reduce demand for air travel. Some 45 per cent of air trips made in Eurocontrol countries are 500 kilometres or less in length. The Germans are looking to replace many of their internal flights with high-speed rail and estimate that a three-hour rail journey is an attractive alternative to a short-haul flight. A modern high-speed train can cover over 800 kilometres in that time, which is a lot further than the distance from London to Glasgow and Edinburgh. France is continuing to expand its TGV network, and trains replaced planes on the Paris to Lyon route many years ago. Other countries across the world, in Europe and elsewhere, are building fast, high-speed rail lines, including Spain, Scandinavia, China and even Taiwan.
	In this country, we can see the first signs of what can be achieved by what Eurostar has managed since the first stage of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link opened last year. It has increased its market share of the London to Paris traffic from 58 per cent to 66 per cent, largely at the expense of British Airways, Air France and easyJet. Once the CTRL has been completed to St Pancras, we must press ahead with plans for the new high-speed north-south line of the kind to which my noble friend referred, which is supported by the Strategic Rail Authority.
	I welcome the Bill. It offers a truly helpful way forward for ensuring that the Royal Commission's proposals to include the costs of climate change in airline ticket prices are implemented. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, would allow me, as chairman of the recently formed All-Party Parliamentary Sustainable Aviation Group, to suggest that he consider talking to both the Royal Commission and our group to see whether his excellent package of regulatory and economic measures can be progressed in a way that moderates and manages demand for air travel and helps to achieve the sustainable aviation strategy that he and I both want.

Baroness Scott of Needham Market: My Lords, from these Benches I should like to say that we, too, are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, for bringing forward his Bill. It raises a very important set of issues for us. Before I start, I should declare an interest as a member of the Commission for Integrated Transport and as the chair of the Local Government Association Transport Executive.
	I fear, however, that I may disappoint the noble Lord slightly because although I support the sentiments behind his Bill—and certainly have no problem with it proceeding to Committee—for reasons that I shall set out I am unable to support the detail of it today.
	In view of the fact that we are now well and truly into the "graveyard shift" and that wild mammals are waiting outside the door, I shall be brief. The centenary of powered flight in December was marked in this country by the Government's plans for the aviation sector for the next 30 years which proposed a massive increase in the aviation capacity for the country. In doing that the Government are faced with many of the issues that faced those of us involved in road building over the past two decades; namely, the issue of how you balance the potentially liberating effects of easily accessible travel with the environmental damage that it can do.
	I understand that more people flew abroad at Christmas last year than went to church on Christmas Day. Having spent a very pleasant new year in Cyprus myself I can understand why that happened. A winter suntan used to be the preserve of the rich. It will be very difficult for this Government or any political party to explain to people why a pleasure they so enjoyed may be denied them. That will be a very difficult job for anyone. It is important for the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, to bear that in mind. I was fascinated by his comment on the insatiability of the aviation industry, but any of us who fly are complicit in that and need to take some responsibility for it.
	I do not intend to indulge in a critique of aviation policy generally, or, indeed, to make any points about whether it is a good or a bad thing for the economy. The respective points of view expressed by the noble Lord and the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, demonstrate that we are a very long way from understanding exactly what the economic benefits, disbenefits and so on, are, particularly as regards short, medium and long-term considerations.
	At the heart of the matter is the whole question of prediction. However, it is a complicated matter and I shall not discuss it other than to say that, clearly, it is very difficult for the Government to get their predictions right. We have to accept that it is not an exact science. Short-term considerations such as the current security situation, or medium-term considerations such as the viability of low-cost airlines and, indeed, long-term considerations such as we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, about global warming and the effects it might have on the way we travel all make prediction very difficult. However, we have to accept that government need to play a role, at least to a certain extent, in determining what that growth might be. They are not passive observers in all this.
	Environmental impacts exist that we ought not to ignore. Today I shall set aside the very important issues of noise, ground pollution and loss of landscape. However, the Government's own acknowledgment that CO 2 emissions from the aviation sector could grow to 25 per cent of the total British contribution ought to lead them to a more committed and immediate set of policies for dealing with the question of emissions. Indeed, many leading transport analysts have argued that there is much that the Government can do in this field working with the industry—as they have been doing—and with the European Union. The Government and BAA have said that they are committed to bringing the aviation sector within the scope of the EU trading scheme. That is much to be welcomed although it will be at least 2008 before that can begin to come into operation.
	As we have heard, other examples of good practice are developing across the world. Tokyo and Sydney airports, for example, charge very high noise premiums on flights. Zurich and Stockholm have schemes under which airlines that reduce their emissions are allowed more flights. Swedish airports place a surcharge on the most polluting aircraft.
	Noble Lords will have realised that, although I have much sympathy with the sentiment behind the noble Lord's Bill, I am unable to support it as it proposes unilateral action in a global industry. Ideally we should have global action on emissions but experience with Kyoto demonstrates how very difficult it is to get international progress on these kinds of issues. However, I consider that action at European Union level is practical, attainable, is a valuable step in its own right and in terms of moving towards future global agreement.
	Having said that, I do not think that the Government can be let off the hook entirely. Something has to be done. With the aviation sector set to double its 2000 emissions by 2030, and the fact that high-altitude emissions are much more damaging than at ground level, there can be no excuse for kicking the issue entirely into the long grass. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, made the most important point of all today; namely, that the short-term economic benefits that the sector brings must be balanced against the long-term environmental difficulties. Both the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and the Environment Agency have publicly expressed that point. I hope that the Government will take their concerns, and those expressed by noble Lords today, with the greatest seriousness.

Baroness Byford: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, for introducing the Bill. I am sure—indeed, we have heard—that we all wish to see a reduction in pollution, and he raises a very important issue. With ever-increasing growth in air flights, more pollution is likely to be created. The challenge is how industry itself tackles that, and what we as individuals can do within the lifestyle choices that we make, whether we travel by air, train or car. We can all make a difference. Those of us who have talked about other issues recently such as water and electricity—some of us dealt with the Energy Bill yesterday—will always maintain that there are things that we can do, and that we can aid the reduction of pollution.
	I am sure that we also wish to encourage manufacturers to continue to move towards reductions in emissions, although I understand that the level is small. Indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde, gave the emissions figure of 0.5 per cent. I am sure that the general public believe that the figure is much higher, so I was glad that she stated it today. I had thought that the figure was 1 per cent, but I take her smaller figure.
	I also understand that measures are being taken by airport operators and airlines to reduce ground emissions. Rolls-Royce, which has been referred to, is committed to technological improvements that will deliver significant reductions by 2010. However, passenger numbers are set to rise—the figures have already been given—from about 130 million to 400 million by 2020. I do not think that anyone in the House says that people should not be able to fly; the challenge is how we balance the extra needs with pollution that may be caused.
	I believe that the Bill has good intentions, and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, understands that I support him in that way. I, for one, support initiatives that will lower pollution, but I have reservations about the Bill as it stands. It calls for an integrated air transport plan, and defines in Clause 1(3) the organisations that shall be consulted. Once completed, the plan is to be laid before Parliament, with an annual report given thereafter. I do not think that any of us would agree with that at all.
	Clause 2 on interpretation defines a whole range of items, some of which are the responsibility of the airport and some the responsibility of the airlines. It also includes,
	"all car trips to and from the airport",
	and,
	"all lorry trips to and from the airport".
	That may have been when I began to get into great difficulty with the practicalities that the noble Lord wants to tackle.
	Although following the noble Lord's desire to reduce air traffic emissions, I find the Bill imprecise and somewhat confusing. In seeking to deal with the three elements of aircraft in the sky, pollution from the airport itself, and the traffic heading to and from the airport, implications arising from the Bill could lead to creating a logistical nightmare and threatening the future of Britain's aviation base.
	In practical terms, for example, what is meant by car and lorry trips to and from the airport? Should the emissions from those vehicles heading towards an airport be calculated from the moment that the vehicle begins its journey, wherever that may be, or just within a certain parameter of the airport? It could be, for example, that a lorry coming all the way from Scotland might have travelled 300 miles before it arrived at a London airport. Another lorry might only have travelled 20 or 30 miles. That is something that we must clarify in Committee. It is a small detail, but raises the difficulties and enormity of the noble Lord's aims.
	In his desire to cut emissions from air traffic, the noble Lord would have to accept that any restrictions imposed on UK-based airlines should be applied to all airlines. Failure to achieve world-wide agreement would act commercially against UK operators. If that approach were taken the level of pollution might rise because other aircraft gaining access to our airports might not have the same standard of emission controls. I do not know whether that would be the case, as I am not in the aircraft business. Perhaps the Minister will clarify that.
	The noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, referred to the possible introduction of take-off and landing charges. Indeed, they are being considered. Can the Minister say whether there are measures in place to achieve improvements to the European targets on aircraft/airport emissions? I know that Statutory Instrument 2002, No. 3118, the National Emission Ceilings Regulations 2002, on environmental protection, came into force on 10 January 2003. It clearly defines regulations on the landing and take-off cycle. I understand that it is part of an EU obligation, but does it affect world-wide regulation or is it restricted to EU airports?
	Several Members have touched on emissions trading, to which I shall return. On 5 December 2002, when we dealt with the Air Quality (England)(Amendment) Regulations 2002, I asked the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington of Ribbleton, who is not in her place:
	"Is air pollution from air travel included in the pollution equation? Is the Minister not concerned about the rapidly expanding use of air travel? Indeed, research is being carried out into new build in respect of airports, which takes into account the forecast of a rapid rise in air travel over the next 20 years".—[Official Report, 5/12/02; col. 1307.]
	I tell the Minister who will respond today that I did not receive a good answer to any of my questions. Could he touch on them?
	I turn now to an article that appeared in Green Futures in November/December 2000. That goes back some time, but the issues are still relevant. It states:
	"Whereas most forms of transport routinely pay some kind of tax or charge to account for some of their polluting consequences, planes are exempt from fuel tax under international law".
	So, I have to ask whether the wish of the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, and other noble Lords for a new tax is possible under international law. However, international aviation also slipped through the net when the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, so there are currently no policy instruments for reducing the impact of climate change. The article continues:
	"At the London seminar, the IPPR's proposals were welcomed both by industry representatives such as British Airways (BA) and by environmental pressure groups such as Friends of the Earth (FoE). Emissions trading proved to be an attractive option to these uncommon bedfellows because it offers a means of securing certain emissions reductions at the least cost to the economy. BA explicitly stated that it favoured emissions trading over a fuel tax".
	Can the Minister comment on the figures for air pollution emissions released on 10 December 2001, which were shown to be continuing on a downward spiral? Can he say whether that downward spiral has continued over the past two years?
	I thank the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, for bringing forward his Bill today. As I said earlier, as it stands, the Bill is limited to the United Kingdom, but the noble Lord may feel that, however good his intentions, he will have difficulty due to the fact that this country is subject to EU regulations. However, he and I share a genuine common goal to reduce pollution wherever possible. I look forward to working with him in Committee, but I fear that he may have to introduce changes if the Bill is to proceed and obtain the approval of Parliament.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, for the opportunity to discuss the issues set out in the Bill. As I believe was predicted, the debate has ranged very widely over all aviation policy issues as well as over environmental policy and pollution issues.
	I fully appreciate the noble Lord's concerns about the harmful impact of air traffic emissions on the environment. I share his view that we should do everything reasonably possible to reduce and limit the environmental costs of air travel—in particular, the growing contribution of aircraft emissions to climate change. There are also significant local environmental impacts, such as local air pollution and noise pollution. The latter has perhaps not received quite the emphasis in this debate that one might have expected.
	Reference was made to aspects of government policy and, in particular, to issues arising from the White Paper. It is not for me to spend an enormous amount of time today articulating government policy and defending the White Paper, although there have been some fairly substantial challenges to the concepts behind it, not least from my noble friend. I hope to refer to those in due course. However, this is a debate about the Bill and I want to concentrate on that.
	I recognise clearly what my noble friend Lady McIntosh said. A whole range of factors can affect potential demand for air travel. We should not underestimate the fact that air disasters of various kinds can severely affect such travel for a period of time. The American experience will always be with us, and we all remember the effect that Lockerbie had on travel by UK citizens. However, I believe that my noble friend recognises that we are talking about current airport policy and the whole aviation industry against the background of the figures that my noble friend Lady Dean outlined. She did so so effectively that I need only make the most passing reference to them.
	By 2030, we expect demand to increase by two-and-a-half times. Even if a certain amount of that were pared off, there would still be the factors which my noble friend set out so eloquently when expressing her concerns about air travel. I believe it would clearly be remiss of the Government if they did not respond to what we all recognise as a growing demand.
	However, I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, that that is not to say that the Government are predicting and providing—far from it. Predict and provide would certainly have meant an immediate decision on an additional runway at Heathrow. But the Government have made it clear that they are not prepared to see that runway implemented until assurances are received that a clear strategy is in place to ensure that air quality around Heathrow meets the European standards to which we are committed and which we are obliged to fulfil. This is a clear illustration that we are concerned to meet the predicted demands of our fellow citizens while, at the same time, having proper regard to the factors which the noble Lord articulated in introducing the Bill.
	I appreciate what the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said in her contribution about demand; namely, that it ill behoves us to seek to choke off the opportunities that the rather more privileged sectors of society have enjoyed for a very considerable time in terms of air travel and the opportunities that that opens up. My noble friend Lord Faulkner mentioned a significant figure in that respect who enjoys a high reputation and whom we all respect for the work that he does, Sir Tom Blundell, the chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. If my noble friend looks in Who's Who he will see that Sir Tom Blundell lists, as one of his interests, international travel.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My noble friend has roused me. It is possible to engage in international travel without flying everywhere.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I had anticipated that my noble friend might come back on that. If he is able to establish that every one of Sir Tom Blundell's trips has been made via the Channel Tunnel or that he has gone by sea, I shall stand entirely corrected. I am not a wagering Minister, but I would say that "international travel" probably suggests an occasional use of aircraft at the very least.
	I emphasise that we recognise that a balance has to be struck between the necessary attempts to meet projected demand with regard to air travel and the necessity to safeguard the environment. The Government have set stringent environmental conditions which we expect operators to meet. I emphasise that point to the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, and to others who spoke in the debate, who may have cast themselves in a somewhat pessimistic mode with regard to what can be achieved. The noble Baroness, Lady Dean, referred to the improvements in aircraft technology which in recent years have led to a reduction in the polluting effects of aircraft engines. We expect that the new regime of aircraft engines will lead to a 50 per cent reduction in the polluting effects, although that does not by any means solve the overall problem.

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: My Lords, I hope my noble friend will forgive me intervening. I know that time is short. Can he tell the House whether the Government have any plans to tie together the airport expansion plans that are now being examined with the introduction of the new generation of aircraft, so that such expansion comes after the introduction of aircraft that can help with emission issues?

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I cannot do that in such a direct way. As I intimated earlier to my noble friend, unless we are able to guarantee the air quality levels at Heathrow, the building of the runway will not take place. There is an interdependence in that absolutely crucial feature, which is a central part of government policy. We are not shying away from our obligations under European and international requirements with regard to protection of the environment in terms of air quality. However, I would not be able and I do not believe that I should be expected to tie every aspect of enhancing air travel specifically to the environment in such a direct way. Such issues are a matter of balance. They have to be taken in the round.
	It will be recognised that the Government, far from predicting and providing, have set out to recognise and identify the contours of demand and to develop airports against that projected demand, accepting the uncertainties of the figures over a period of time. We should recognise that air travel generation is still at a low level in certain parts of the world. One cannot view the rate at which the Indian economy—and even more the Chinese—is expanding without recognising that that will be reflected in increased demand for air travel.
	Some of my noble friends say that with regard to the internal situation we could do much more by rail. The Government are concerned to emphasise how greatly they view the benefits of long-range rail—that is why investment in rail is proceeding apace with the modernisation of the West Coast Main Line—and the importance of rail to our overall economy.
	Noble Lords should not be too sanguine about the easy substitution of air travel for rail. Although Europe has developed some greatly to be envied rail links—we think of the TGV in France for obvious reasons, but it is true also in Germany—it is not clear that that has led to a substitution of rail for air. It may be that rail has taken up some demand that otherwise would have been concentrated on air travel, but there is scarcely an air service which has disappeared because of competition by rail travel. Paris to Brussels is an instance of that. It is also the case that certain air routes have not expanded as rapidly as they might have done through rail travel.
	However, we should not exaggerate the easy substitution of one for the other; not least because a great deal of internal air travel in the United Kingdom relates to getting to Heathrow as a hub airport for travel elsewhere. That is not easily substituted by rail because of the particular convenience that rail presents for city centre to city centre travel, which obviously does not obtain when all one wants to do is to get to the main hub airport.
	So I respect the points made in these areas. That is why we are concerned to see investment in rail and—a point particularly emphasised by my noble friend Lord Faulkner—that expansion and a considerable investment in rail services. That does not mean that it is a ready alternative to the question of air travel.
	I have been enjoining noble Lords all through this long day that speeches should be kept to a reasonable length. Ordinarily, I would have availed myself of perhaps a 15-minute speech. I am fairly close to that now. I think that I should follow my own instructions and seek to limit what I have to say. Therefore, I shall conclude on this point. The policies set out in the aviation White Paper will support economic prosperity throughout the United Kingdom; will enable people to make flights at reasonable costs; and will control and mitigate the environmental impacts of aviation.
	As a matter of principle, any additional action to tackle the environmental impacts of aviation will take full account of the effects on the competitiveness of UK aviation and the impact on consumers. We have to strike a balance. The beauty of this debate is that I think that balance has been struck, both as to the very strong environmental considerations that have been articulated and the very precise enumeration by my noble friend Lady Dean of the importance of the industry to the British economy.
	The Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, does not appear to give due regard to the important considerations of the economic significance of the airline industry. It is for those reasons that the Government will have difficulty in supporting the Bill.

Baroness Byford: Before the noble Lord sits down and before the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, responds, perhaps I may say two things to the Minister: first, obviously, the noble Lord has not had the opportunity to answer any of our questions. I hope that he will write to us as issues have been raised which should be addressed.
	Secondly, and much more importantly—and the noble Lord referred to it just now—I should like to record our dismay at the time of day at which we are taking important business through the House. The House rose at 3.30 p.m. yesterday. The business managers have got this wrong. We still have two important issues to discuss. At the end of each debate, I will say the same thing. That is unfair and has put huge pressure on noble Lords to speak at shorter length—although that did not occur during the previous debate. Speakers in this debate have tried to respond and keep their contributions fairly short. I should be grateful if the Minister would reflect on the concerns of these Benches, and, I suspect, other Members in the Chamber, that we are taking through important business at this time of day.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I share the concerns expressed by the noble Baroness and will of course reconsider the matter. Private Members' Bills are never easy to predict—even the number of speakers is not known until quite late—but I recognise that our attempts to hit today's target of four o'clock have not been realised. We will re-examine the situation.
	On the noble Baroness's specific questions—she raised some very specific questions about our airports policy—I will of course write to her. I am concerned that she did not receive the answers that she wanted and will ensure that they are delivered. I just do not think that I have time within the framework of today's debate to respond in detail.

Baroness Byford: My Lords, further to that, it is not just that we are late today; it is that the House rose yesterday at 3.30 p.m. Surely some of this business could have been anticipated and taken yesterday.

Lord Beaumont of Whitley: My Lords, earlier, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, said that in his experience during 20 years in this House, the Peer responding to a Second Reading debate on a private Member's Bill should just thank noble Lords who took part and sit down. I take what he said seriously; with the benefit of my 30 years' experience, I back it up.
	First, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part—although it must be clear that I thank some of them more than others. I shall just mention one point that was made: the question of one country going it alone. I agree that countries need to act together, but there is enormous value in one country showing the way forward. That pinpoints the problem and helps with trying to solve it in other countries. I therefore do not regard that objection, which was mentioned by at least four speakers, as overwhelming.
	It is the tradition of your Lordships' House that the House does Members the courtesy of allowing a Second Reading. No one has suggested otherwise in the debate.
	On Question, Bill read a second time, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Wild Mammals (Protection) (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord Donoughue: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. In doing so, I join the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, in protesting about the hour at which these proceedings are taking place on a Friday. It is ludicrous that we rose at 3.30 p.m. yesterday. The problem is also linked to the new system of fixing Friday business—and too rarely—so that too much accumulates on Fridays. That is very unfair on Members. The majority of noble Lords who might have supported my Bill—many have spoken to me—understandably wanted to be home before midnight. The fact that business keeps Ministers here this late would almost make some of us weep.
	The Bill, although variously amended and improved, has received a Second Reading on three occasions—in 2001, 2003 and now. I need not, therefore, detain the House with too much detail already in Hansard. But, for the record, and for new readers, I must again summarise its purpose. The existing Wild Mammals (Protection) Act 1996 protects wild mammals, but the offences are limited to those listed, such as stabbing and burning, while certain activities, such as lawful hunting and shooting, are exempt.
	This Bill goes much wider in its protection of mammals. It removes the list of offences and the list of exemptions, replacing them with a general offence of intentionally causing undue suffering. It also establishes a system for the recognition and approval of governing bodies and their codes of conduct, covering all activities relating to wild mammals. This system is to be conducted by an independent authority composed of representatives of distinguished countryside bodies and financed by countryside organisations. Adherence to those codes by practitioners of country activities could be used as part of a defence against prosecution under the Act.
	The Bill has clear advantages. It would enhance protection of wild mammals from undue suffering. It sets a consistent standard covering all offences and all mammals. It establishes an authority that is independent, expert and balanced, recognising governing bodies and approving their codes to ensure that best practices are observed in the management and conservation of wild mammals. The authority would ensure that activities are carried out in a normal and humane manner; it could not approve a code that simply brought the activity to an end.
	For those concerned with animal welfare and cruelty, the Bill is an advance on existing animal welfare legislation, which is in many ways incoherent and piecemeal. It is certainly an advance on the narrow Bill on hunting with dogs, which was demolished here in the previous Session. That Bill covered only four mammals—fox, deer, hare and mink—and permitted alternative methods of control, such as shooting and snaring, which can often cause more suffering. This Bill protects all wild mammals from undue suffering in all circumstances. It is in line with the Burns report and would meet what the Prime Minister and Peter Hain have asked for—the resolution of the fox-hunting issue in this Parliament.
	It would allow the testing in the courts of the allegations of cruelty in fox-hunting. If anti-hunting organisations really care about cruelty to animals, they should support the Bill. Their spasmodic opposition suggests to some that they care more about hating people who hunt than about animal suffering.
	The Bill was previously supported on all sides of the House, although the Minister expressed reservations—usually helpful—and on each occasion, as today, we have listened and amended the Bill accordingly. Should he have further helpful suggestions, we will again listen to see if we can include them in the Bill.
	The change to this Bill, compared with that passed in the previous Session, relates to a comment by my noble friend Lord Whitty at Third Reading. He rightly pointed out that under Section 2 a defendant might plead that his action had been in the usual conduct of a customary activity, even though contrary to an express provision of the relevant code. That is not our intention, and I trust that the new drafting remedies this.
	I thank the Minister for his contributions to improving this Bill, though that may not always have been the prime objective of his department. In particular, I thank the many country organisations, especially the Country Landowners' Association, the National Farmers Union, the Countryside Alliance and the Middle Way Group for bringing their great expertise to improving this Bill. I thank particularly the noble Viscount, Lord Bledisloe, for his skilful and tireless legal drafting.
	Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Lord Donoughue.)

Lord Willoughby de Broke: My Lords, in the absence of the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft—I am not Lord Mancroft, for the benefit of Hansard—I rise to support this Bill. I declare my interest as chairman of St Martin's Magazines, publishers of Country Illustrated and Hunting Magazine, field sports and rural interest magazines.
	I warmly support the noble Lord's Bill. As he has explained, it will improve and simplify the current Wild Mammals (Protection) Act 1996 by substituting the amendment that he has introduced for the arbitrary list of activities that, under the 1996 Act, are deemed to amount to cruelty to wild mammals. Bizarrely—because that Act started life as an anti-hunting Bill—hunting, shooting, coursing and pest control are specifically excluded from the provision of the 1996 Act. The noble Lord's Bill would remove that exemption.
	I welcome this Bill because as a supporter of fox hunting I believe that it should not enjoy specific exemption under the Act, but should be within rather than without the law. If this Bill were to be enacted, it would allow those who claim that fox hunting is more cruel than other methods of control to test that claim in court. I am confident that properly run hunts have nothing to fear from the Bill.
	The Bill will simply and effectively improve protection for wild mammals across the board, rather than in the somewhat piecemeal way of the present Act. It will effectively address concerns not only with hunting, but also with other methods of control such as shooting, snaring, gassing or trapping, thus guaranteeing a wholesale improvement in animal welfare. I am therefore a little surprised at the faint praise with which this Bill was greeted by the Government when it was debated in this House in March last year. I hope that the noble Lord's amendments will satisfy the Government in that regard.
	Each of the Government's objections has been met halfway or further by the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue. If the Government are serious about improving protection for wild mammals, they should now find it in themselves to thank the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, for introducing this Bill and should pick it up as a government Bill. It would at a stroke get them out of their bind on hunting; they could tell all those who oppose hunting, including those tiresome Back-Benchers who hijacked the Government's Bill late last year, that it should be a given that it makes no sense to ban one method of fox control while leaving others in place that cause more suffering. They should tell them that if they believe that hunting is more cruel than other methods of control, this Bill gives them the means to prove it.
	That should satisfy those who have a principled objection to hunting on the grounds of cruelty, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, pointed out, it will not satisfy those who engage in good, old-fashioned class warfare, or those who have been handsomely paid to deliver a ban, and forget animal welfare if it gets in the way of that ban.
	That brings me to the strange case of the RSPCA. I single out the RSPCA, distinct from political lobbying groups, because it is a charity, enjoying all the privileges of the Charities Act. That status is based on its aims to prevent cruelty to animals and to improve animal welfare. The Bill that we are debating today does exactly that. Yet what is the reaction of the RSPCA? It is not a whole-hearted welcome, a cautious welcome, or even a wait-and-see, but a cheap knee-jerk dismissal of a serious attempt to improve animal welfare. I would like to ask: why?
	All that the RSPCA has said is that the Bill is "unhelpful". In what sense is it "unhelpful"? Surely, not to animal welfare, which is central to the whole Bill. I can conclude only that it is unhelpful to its campaign to ban hunting, unhelpful to its fund-raising and, thus, unhelpful to the various jobsworths in the RSPCA who are dependent on that campaign for their salaries, their cars, their pensions and their perks. Its refusal to engage with the issues raised by the Bill is also an admission that its own evidence will not stand up to scrutiny in a court of law.
	I very much hope that the Minister will, unlike the RSPCA, engage positively with the aims of the Bill. It will help the Government to move from the unhappy position in which they find themselves following the hijack of their Hunting Bill by extremists. They will receive great support from rural communities if they concentrate their efforts on improving animal welfare rather than seeking to regulate human behaviour on the basis of subjective moral judgments. It is on those grounds that I warmly welcome this Bill put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue. I very much hope that the Government will decide to take it forward.

Lord Livsey of Talgarth: My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, on being so persistent since 2001 in bringing forward this Bill. I believe that he is right to do so. When one examines the Bill, it clearly is the best solution: it resolves all issues of cruelty to wild mammals, including hunting with dogs, and it caters for all wild mammals, which should be protected and treated equally from undue suffering. That is an excellent formula for resolving all kinds of problems in this area.
	The noble Lord mentioned that the Bill is consistent with the Burns report on hunting. As yet it has not been said that the Bill ensures wild animals are treated in the same way as domestic animals. That is very important and, I think, everyone in the United Kingdom can understand that. This is understandable legislation, should we be fortunate enough to see it on the statute book.
	As the noble Lord said, the Bill also incorporates consultation. Indeed, the authority that is to be set up in the schedule to the Bill will produce the code of practice, which will be underwritten by law. That is very important because everyone will be able to see that fair play is taking place, including the RSPCA. The result would be an immediate improvement to the welfare of all wild mammals.
	I hope that the Bill—I am sure that it will if it becomes an Act—will settle many controversial views on both sides of the argument and produce a compromise that can be accepted by all reasonable people. In that spirit, I hope that the Minister will give the Bill a fair wind and that during this Session it will get on the statute book, as it deserves to be.

Baroness Byford: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, for presenting this Bill. I congratulate him on his tenacity in continuing to bring forward important legislation that tackles the question of deliberate cruelty to wild mammals. It was back in March 2003 that a similar Bill was debated at Second Reading. It is my sorrow, and, I am sure, the sorrow of the whole House, that Lord Hardy of Wath is no longer with us. His concern and contributions to environmental and animal welfare matters were put with great knowledge and passion.
	Before I go any further, I should remind noble Lords that Members on these Benches operate in free vote territory on issues which touch on hunting. So some of my comments today and at later stages will reflect my own views. I hunted with the Quorn and rode a great deal in my younger days. I am sure that we are all concerned about animal suffering and support any moves that aim to provide greater protection to wild mammals.
	The Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, highlights the inconsistencies in current animal welfare legislation. It will go a long way towards clarifying the law in relation to wild mammals and protecting them from intentional and unnecessary suffering. If approved, the Bill would give wild mammals the same protection as that enjoyed by domestic and farm animals. Along with other noble Lords, I hope that outside organisations and charities will support this Bill. In evidence submitted to Defra's consultation on new animal welfare legislation conducted in August 2002, the RSPCA submitted evidence from which I should like to quote:
	"a specific offence of cruelty should remain, but should be worded without a restrictive list of particular activities which may date over time".
	This Bill would address those concerns and marks an advance on the current, piecemeal legislation.
	I am sure that many people who are members or supporters of the RSPCA and other animal charities would be horrified if they thought that their organisation would not support such changes. It is an illogical stance. My noble friend Lord Willoughby de Broke clarified the position and I believe that the stance adopted by the RSPCA is unhelpful.
	Let us hope that the RSPCA can be persuaded to change its mind, especially since the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, has altered his original 2003 Bill and addressed the concerns expressed at the time. Surely it must be right to safeguard animal welfare and to give each species of wild mammal the same level of protection.
	The Bill would establish an independent authority comprised of representatives from different organisations which are identified in the Bill. During the Bill's progress through its stages last year, additions were made to the list following concerns expressed by some that the original list was too narrow. I am sure that it was correct to make the alterations.
	The independent authority would have the power to recognise various bodies in order that they could produce codes of conduct for particular activities. Once approved by the authority, those codes would be submitted to the Secretary of State for final approval. Once a code of conduct is approved, abidance by it could make up part of a defence against causing undue suffering. The codes of conduct must be,
	"in respect of the normal and humane manner of conducting any activity in connection with wild mammals or one or more species of wild mammal".
	Last year, when responding to the Second Reading debate, the Minister acknowledged that that original Bill had merits. He went on to say that:
	"The principle in the Bill of providing a coherent and simpler approach to the protection of wild mammals is a desirable objective".—[Official Report, 7/3/03; col. 1081.]
	I hope that the Minister will be able to support this Bill, which has taken into account the concerns expressed during the passage of the previous legislation. For my own part, obviously I support it.
	Before I sit down, if a new Minister is to respond, perhaps I may raise once again the issue already referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, at the start of our Second Reading debate this afternoon. I warmly welcome the Bill.

Lord Whitty: My Lords, first, I join with the noble Baroness in regretting the absence from our proceedings of Lord Hardy of Wath. He always made extremely effective contributions to animal welfare issues. We shall all miss him.
	The stated intention of this Bill is to extend and improve the protection which the law gives to wild mammals. My noble friend Lord Donoughue has explained how he believes that would be achieved through this legislation. As he and other noble Lords have said, this is not the first time that a similar Bill has been considered by your Lordships. On previous occasions I have had to say that, while I accept that there is merit in trying to provide a coherent and comprehensive framework for the protection of wild mammals, the Government could not agree to the principles of the Bill. I regret to say that I have to disappoint the noble Lord by saying the same today, even though, as he explained, he has taken on board a number of the comments I made during the previous Session and introduced changes which are a definite improvement to aspects of the Bill.
	However, our reasons for not agreeing with the Bill are fairly simple. First and centrally, the Bill would create a new offence of intentionally causing "undue suffering". This would replace the existing offence of committing specified acts with the intention of causing "unnecessary suffering", a long-established concept. "Undue suffering" is a new and untried concept. It presupposes that the suffering which human beings may cause to wild mammals can somehow be measured on a scale and that there is a point on that scale beyond which the suffering becomes excessive, unacceptable and therefore unlawful.
	This misses the central point that it is unacceptable to cause any suffering to a wild mammal for a purpose which is not necessary or which could be achieved in a more humane way. That is why the existing law rightly defines cruelty as the causing of "unnecessary suffering". By contrast, logically, the Bill would allow people to cause suffering which it could be argued may not be "undue"—whatever that means—but which is certainly not necessary. So the Bill would permit at least some unnecessary suffering and in some cases, therefore, dilute the existing protection.
	My second area of objection is more complicated in that the Bill provides for exceptions from the main offence which could be used to allow, for example, field sports to continue regardless of the suffering they cause. Let us look at the proposed exceptions.
	The proposed new Section 2(1)(a) exempts all acts—presumably however cruel—which are carried out in accordance with a recognised code. Those codes will be drawn up by organisations recognised for the purpose by an authority composed of representatives of nine bodies. I accept that my noble friend has now included the RSPCA alongside the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, but these are the only two bodies on the authority that are primarily concerned with animal welfare. Of the rest, no fewer than four could be said to represent field sports. I regard that neither as a balanced body nor as a move, to use the words of the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, half-way towards a position where we could regard this as a genuinely objective body. The very clear implication is that the organisations which are to draw up the codes will, to a large extent, be the same ones that currently run field sports.
	There is nothing in the Bill that requires the authority to commission or recognise any particular code, or requires a recognised organisation to draw up such a code. Indeed, it could be said that there is a disincentive to do so because where there is no code the wider exemption of proposed new Section 2(1)(b) applies to suffering caused to a mammal,
	"in the normal and humane conduct of a lawful and customary activity".
	This exemption presupposes that because a time-honoured tradition has previously caused suffering, that suffering is therefore acceptable.
	That exemption is subject to the proviso in new Section 2(2)(a) that the exception does not apply,
	"where the suffering caused by [an] act should reasonably have been avoided or substantially alleviated in the course of [the] conduct of that activity".
	I note that this proviso was applied to both exceptions in the previous Bill. But while some improvements in this area have been made in this new version of the Bill, in this respect the proviso will now not apply where a code is in force. That cannot be right. The issue can perhaps be dealt with by amendments in Committee.
	The noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, said that the Bill would allow comparison of the relative suffering caused by methods of pest control. I believe that he was referring particularly to the fox hunting debate. But there is nothing in the Bill which allows a comparison of suffering caused by different methods of pest control—hunting with dogs as against snaring, for example—because if hunting with dogs was the subject of a recognised code, as might be the implication of this, it could continue even if everyone agreed that it did cause more suffering than other forms of pest control. That cannot be right and it is certainly not acceptable to the Government.
	While I can see why my noble friend has brought this Bill before the House once again and why there may be some temptation to say that it will provide a better framework, the central issue is what is undue suffering as against unnecessary suffering and what that implies for the current and currently debated forms of protection of wild mammals. I appreciate that there is a ghost at the feast and that we are, in part, talking about the Hunting Bill, which fell last time. I do not believe that this Bill, even if it could be amended, would be the way to deal with hunting with dogs. I frankly think that my noble friend and those who support the Bill in pursuing it in that context, as distinct from the wider context, are engaging in wishful thinking.
	The issue will not be resolved by giving the field sports organisations the ability to draw up codes legitimising their own activities. To be acceptable, any legislation must effectively prevent unnecessary cruelty, and the Bill does not do that.
	I am afraid that that is the Government's position. The Bill will no doubt move to subsequent stages, but unless its central dilemma is resolved, while we can make some improvements, I doubt whether the Government would accept the Bill in anything like its current form.

Lord Donoughue: My Lords, I thank all who have taken part in this debate, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, for reminding us of the absence of Lord Hardy, who was a great expert in this area. The last conversation I had with him, in the Library, was on this issue; he strongly encouraged me to go forward with the Bill, which we have done.
	The Minister, not surprisingly, has come up with some new reservations on the Bill which, presumably, the Government had not thought of on the previous several occasions, since the distinction between "undue" and "unnecessary" has been there from the beginning. That has been the subject of very intensive and distinguished legal consideration. I will go into that more next time.
	On the balance of the authority, the Minister will see that the Bill contains a provision to appoint two more members, and those two members could be such as to produce a different balance if that was desirable. I did not fully understand his last point, because it is not just for the sports to write their codes and then continue accordingly, or as before. It is for the authority to scrutinise those codes and accept them or not accept them and then pass them, with recommendations, to the Minister for him to accept or not accept. So I think his last point, as I heard it, is simply a misunderstanding of what is in the Bill.
	I shall not detain the House longer. I ask the House to give the Bill a Second Reading.
	On Question, Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Solvent Emissions (England and Wales) Regulations 2004

Lord Whitty: rose to move, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 11 December 2003 be approved [3rd Report from the Joint Committee].

Lord Whitty: My Lords, I beg to move that the draft regulations laid before the House on 11 December 2003 be approved.
	The regulations will complete the transposition in England and Wales of Council directive 1999/13 on the limitation of emissions of volatile organic compounds due to the use of organic solvents in certain industrial activities and installations, also known as the Solvent Emissions Directive. This is an environmental measure that will help to reduce pollution, and protect public health.
	We have already partly transposed the directive in England and Wales by means of directions issued in March 2002 under the existing environmental regimes of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and the Pollution Prevention and Control (PPC) Regulations 2000. The directions bolt on to the existing regimes and set limits as required by the directive for those solvent activities that were already in place under the existing pollution control regimes.
	The regulations amend the PPC Regulations 2000, thus using the existing pollution prevention and control regime as the vehicle for implementation. They give effect to the remaining parts of the solvent emissions directive by extending the powers of local authorities to regulate fugitive emissions to air, water and soil for solvent emissions directive activities. They regulate for the first time all those remaining activities that were not regulated before under any existing environmental regime. The pollution prevention and control regulations, as amended by these regulations, will eventually replace the directions. These regulations will provide the necessary framework for the regulation of all solvent activities in accordance with the requirements of the directive.
	We have the benefit of a regulatory impact assessment, which has set out the cost/benefit analysis of these proposals, and it has been presented to the House. I commend these draft regulations to the House.

Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 11 December 2003 be approved. [3rd Report from the Joint Committee].—(Lord Whitty.)

Baroness Byford: My Lords, I thank the Minister for presenting and explaining, slightly briefly, these regulations before us today. They are quite considerable and, I know that the hour is late, but I thought that the Minister was a little too brief. The Opposition broadly welcome the purpose behind the regulations, although, clearly, they should have been in situ earlier. We are discussing the 1999 directive which should have been transposed into national law by April 2001.
	The statutory instrument sets limits on the use of solvents in a wide range of industrial activities. The measures should help to reduce pollution and protect public health, something that I am sure we all welcome. When this statutory instrument was being discussed in another place, the Minister, Alun Michael, stated that there are likely to be additional costs to industry as the result of charges and fees for applications for the permits to operate. What cost analysis has been undertaken, and what are the implications, on average, for small, medium and large businesses? The Minister also claimed at that time that the industry broadly supported the proposals. How many industries did not give their approval, and how many did? Were more than half in favour, or did many more express reservations? Why is it that only the dry cleaning industry has been hit so hard? What research was done?
	Further, when collected, how is this income to be used? What is the estimated total income likely to be? Will this income fill the Chancellor's black hole or will it be ring-fenced in some way? Will the income raised be sufficient only to cover the cost of registration or will there be spare monies? In his response, perhaps the Minister would answer these questions which were left unclarified in another place.
	Would he also tell us how the various levels set in the solvent consumption thresholds in tonnes per year were arrived at? They vary from zero for dry cleaning to 100 tonnes for the manufacture of coating preparations, varnishes, inks and adhesives. The Explanatory Memorandum states:
	"Ground level ozone is a widespread and chronic problem within the European Community. Concentrations of ozone can have a detrimental effect to human health and can cause damage to vegetation, crops and building materials. The rise of ground level ozone experienced during this summer months all over Europe suggests that there is an urgent need to curb the emissions of solvents and other pollutants into the media. The new Regulations would add to our armoury for tackling air pollution as envisaged in our air quality strategies".
	We would all accept that, but the questions that I raised earlier need to be answered.
	The Government claim to have applied a "light regulatory touch" to avoid unnecessary burdens on regulators and operators, but are all present EU countries adopting the UK interpretation of this statutory instrument? In other words, is the legislation being applied throughout the current EU? Will the same rate be applied to the 10 incoming countries that expect to join in May this year? If not, does the Minister accept that UK businesses may be put at a competitive disadvantage?
	I return to the dry cleaning industry. The Minister, Alun Michael, said that the reduced charge for dry cleaners was part of the light touch that the Government were considering. Why are the Government considering that only now? Why was that consideration not settled before the statutory instrument was brought before the House on 7 January in another place? Has any new information emerged since that debate took place?
	Finally, the Minister in another place said that the delays to the introduction of the statutory instrument were due to a period of fairly challenging Bills and significant secondary legislation. He particularly mentioned the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, on which considerable work was involved, and added that considerable work still had to be done. How much money was allocated for the implementation of that Act, and what to date is the total cost of the mapping exercise, which I understand has gone well over budget?
	If the Minister cannot answer those two last questions—and I am aware that he may not be able to—I would be grateful if he would write to me about it. If it is true, it is concerning that there is not enough money in the budget to fulfil the environmental obligations to the extent that some statutory instruments that should have been brought in earlier had to be deferred. The department should address those financial needs.
	The Government should not hide behind those various predictions, although I am sure that genuine excuses are there, and I have no doubt that the Minister will share them with us. We are entitled to clarification on that point.
	I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, who is going to hear me say it for the third time this afternoon, but I must again register my dismay. It is now a quarter to five. The Minister will probably be quite brief in his response, but my calculations tell me that we shall have been sitting for six and three-quarter hours on Friday, which is a day on which we are not supposed to sit late. If it were a Thursday, and business started at three o'clock, we would be rising at a quarter to ten tonight. However, because it is a Friday, which is supposed to be for private Members' Bills and to have fairly light business, we are likely to rise not before a quarter to five. However, if I end there, perhaps the Minister will make it before five, and the noble Lord, Lord Livsey, will have the chance to put his response to this statutory instrument.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, as the noble Baroness rightly says, I have listened to her upbraiding on more than one occasion today, and I accept it. However, she will appreciate that the miscalculation was done on all sides: the usual channels agreed this form of business, and of course we have rather radically miscalculated. We shall learn our lessons from this event, I am sure.

Baroness Byford: My Lords, I am grateful for the spirit in which the noble Lord has responded. I am sure that all usual channels will consider the matter further.

Lord Livsey of Talgarth: My Lords, I should like to subscribe to most of the points made so clearly by the noble Baroness, Lady Byford. In particular, the solvent emissions directive came forward in 1999 and should have been adopted by April 2001. We are still discussing it, however. My colleague Norman Baker, the honourable Member for Lewes, drew the Minister's attention to that in the debate in another place. It is not good enough.
	The noble Baroness has made many of the points that I wished to make, so I shall make only two, which concern me greatly.
	First, one provision in the regulations is predicted to result in the closure of all coin-operated laundrettes. Many people on low incomes use those laundrettes—we are talking about unmanned laundrettes—and this will make it extremely hard for them—perhaps particularly at unsocial hours, which are the only hours they have in which to do their washing. Many single people, for example, are in that situation. Will the Government take account of that situation? It seems to be very unfair.
	Secondly, zero emissions appear to be the aim of this regulation. There are 7,000 dry cleaning shops in the United Kingdom, of which only 5 per cent are immediately able to have zero emissions, as the Government, through this regulation, would like. What is the Government's plan for the other 95 per cent that cannot meet this standard? The aims of this regulation are very worth while from environmental and human health points of view, but there are certain practicalities, to which I have just drawn the Minister's attention, which deserve a response.

Lord Whitty: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Livsey, for getting me on at 4.45 p.m. and I promise to finish at least by 5 p.m. It should not be left off the record that while the rest of the House concluded at 3.30 p.m. yesterday, the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, my noble friend Lord Davies of Oldham and I—and the noble Lord, Lord Livsey—were all still involved in Grand Committee at 7.00 p.m. Our other colleagues should at least read that.

Lord Davies of Oldham: And the Deputy Speaker.

Lord Whitty: And the Deputy Speaker, my Lords. Indeed, my apologies. Here we are again.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Byford, raised a number of issues. She started with the issue of the delay. Clearly, it is embarrassing for the Government to have to accept that there was a delay. The regulations were squeezed out by the number of other priorities, plus the government reorganisation following the creation of Defra. The CROW Bill was doubtless part of that. I am not sure that it was the totality of that. If there is any information I can let her have on the CROW Bill costs, I shall do so. However, there were other priorities in the transposition of directives that also squeezed this work. Although any delay beyond the due date is regrettable, in practice it will not make as big a difference as all that. As far as existing installations are concerned, the main provisions of the regulations will not come into effect until 2007, and never would have done.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Byford, asked about the costs to industry. They are set out in some detail in the regulatory impact assessment. They are not dramatically high. She also asked how industry responded. A substantial majority of the industrial sectors were in support. The main concerns related to dry cleaning, to which both she and the noble Lord, Lord Livsey, have referred.
	As for the compliance costs of inspections and so forth, the costs charged to industry will cover only the costs of inspections themselves and therefore will not go into the Chancellor's general coffers, no doubt much to his regret. Nevertheless, that is rightly the way in which we do these things. Small businesses, specifically dry cleaners, as the noble Baroness accepted, will face a much lower charge level.
	I am not sure that we have any international competition on coin-in-the-slot laundrettes. However, as regards the rest of the industry, all countries, including the accession countries, will have to comply with these regulations. As far as I am aware there is no derogation for any of the accession countries. Existing installations have until 2007 to comply. It is a light-touch regime with a simplified procedure for dry cleaning.
	I accept that coin-in-the-slot dry cleaning has been a feature of at least some laundrettes although, of course, we are talking about the dry cleaning side not the general washing machines. In most cases now dry cleaning is attended as opposed to people using coin-in-the slot machines. Much of that could continue provided the requirements are met. The zero figure is the point at which the regulations come into effect. Generally the regulations must be observed whenever a solvent is used. Significantly higher thresholds apply to manufacturing processes. It is not that solvents cannot be used, but they must be subject to rigorous controls when they are.
	I believe that most of the concerns that were expressed during the consultation period have been met by the Government. As I say, the majority of industries that are affected support the measure. In any case it is a European requirement. When everything is in place it will form part of an overall regulatory system rather than creating its own regulatory structure. Therefore, it should form part of an intelligent system of regulation rather than constitute an extra part operating on a different basis.
	In general this is an example of good regulation that has the support of at least the majority of those affected by it.

On Question, Motion agreed to.
	House adjourned at eight minutes before five o'clock.